An account, a project, an API key, and the SDK. About three minutes — and everything else in these docs assumes it is done.

1. Create an account

Sign up at www.variably.dev. Use your work email: accounts are scoped to an organisation, and a personal address puts you in one of your own.

2. Create a project

A project is what everything belongs to — evaluations, experiments, sessions, keys. Create one from the sidebar and name it after the application it will hold.

Give each application its own API key. An API key writes to its own project and nowhere else, so two applications sharing an API key have their traffic scored together, which makes the numbers hard to act on. The same applies per environment.

3. Generate an API key

API Keys in the sidebar, then generate one for this project.

Copy it before you leave the page. Keys are hashed on creation, so the value is shown once and cannot be recovered afterwards. If you lose it, delete that key and generate another.

4. Install the SDK

pip install variably-sdk

Python 3.9 or later.

5. Set two environment variables

VARIABLY_API_KEY=vbl_your_key_here
VARIABLY_BASE_URL=https://api.variably.dev

The SDK reads both automatically. Set them in the environment your application actually runs in: an API key in your shell is not an API key in your container, which is the most common reason nothing arrives.

You are set up

Nothing has been scored yet; that is the next page. Introduction to evaluation explains what you can evaluate, or go straight to the Quickstart.