Authentication using Databricks personal access tokens

To authenticate to and access Databricks REST APIs, you can use Databricks personal access tokens or passwords. We strongly recommend that you use tokens. Like passwords, tokens should be treated with care. Unlike passwords, tokens expire and can be revoked.

Requirements

Token-based authentication is enabled by default for all Databricks accounts launched after January 2018. If it is disabled, your administrator must enable it before you can perform the tasks described in this article. See Enable token-based authentication for your workspace.

Generate a personal access token

This section describes how to generate a personal access token in the Databricks UI. You can also generate and revoke tokens using the Token API.

  1. Click the user profile icon User Profile in the upper right corner of your Databricks workspace.

  2. Click User Settings.

  3. Go to the Access Tokens tab.

    List_Tokens

  4. Click the Generate New Token button.

  5. Optionally enter a description (comment) and expiration period.

    Generate_Token

  6. Click the Generate button.

  7. Copy the generated token and store in a secure location.

Revoke a personal access token

This section describes how to revoke personal access tokens using the Databricks UI. You can also generate and revoke access tokens using the Token API.

  1. Click the user profile icon User Profile in the upper right corner of your Databricks workspace.
  2. Click User Settings.
  3. Go to the Access Tokens tab.
  4. Click x for the token you want to revoke.
  5. On the Revoke Token dialog, click the Revoke Token button.

Use a personal access token to access the Databricks REST API

You can store a personal access token in .netrc and use in curl or pass it to the Authorization: Bearer header.

Store token in .netrc file and use in curl

Create a .netrc file with machine, login, and password properties:

machine <databricks-instance>
login token
password <personal-access-token>

where:

  • <databricks-instance> is the <account>.cloud.databricks.com domain name of your Databricks deployment.
  • token is the literal string token
  • <personal-access-token> is the value of your personal access token.

Important

You can optionally set login to your Databricks username and password to your Databricks password. However, we recommend that you use a personal access token to authenticate to an API endpoint. If you choose to use a username and password, do not use -u to pass your credentials as follows:

curl -u <your-username>:<your-password> -X GET https://<databricks-instance>/api/2.0/clusters/list

To invoke the .netrc file, use -n in your curl command:

curl -n -X GET https://<databricks-instance>/api/2.0/clusters/list

Pass token to Bearer authentication

You can include the token in the header using Bearer authentication. You can use this approach with curl or any client that you build. For the latter, see Upload a big file into DBFS.

curl -X GET -H 'Authorization: Bearer <personal-access-token>' https://<databricks-instance>/api/2.0/clusters/list