To use python-google-places, you'll need to do this on ACMS:

pip install --user python-google-places

or this on your own laptop:

pip install python-google-places

Google API Key

You need a Google API Key from the Google Places API Web Service

Define your key in the env.sh file

Copy env.sh.sample to env.sh with:

cp env.sh.sample env.sh

Then edit env.sh to add a definition for GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY, like this:

export GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY=s8fawefj98aw9efaew89fasefa98ewf

Then, in each new terminal window you open, before running idle, or before using python mywebapp.py, you need to type this at the bash terminal prompt:

. env.sh

You can see if it worked by running the script python env_demo.py. If you didn't do . env.sh yet, it will look like this:

$ python env_demo.py
GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY= None
GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY is undefined
$ 

Here is what it looks like when it IS defined:

$ python env_demo.py
GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY= 's8fawefj98aw9efaew89fasefa98ewf'
GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY=s8fawefj98aw9efaew89fasefa98ewf
$ 

This keeps the key value out of the Python code that gets committed into github. Note that env.sh appears in the .gitignore for this repo, so it NOT committed to github~

Preliminaries

Add the import to the Python code where you are using the Google Places API:

from googleplaces import GooglePlaces, types, lang

Add this line of code to your file. If its a Flask webapp, put this after the app = Flask(__name__) line.

google_places = GooglePlaces(os.environ['GOOGLE_PLACES_API_KEY'])