Authentication

The first time you launch the interactive TUI (buzz with no arguments), you’ll be prompted to authenticate with Beeminder. You can also authenticate explicitly at any time with buzz auth login — which is what the other subcommands (buzz today, buzz next, etc.) point you to if no credentials are found.

Either way, the steps are the same:

1. Visit https://www.beeminder.com/api/v1/auth_token.json to get your credentials.

2. Copy the JSON output. It has this format:

   {"username":"your_username","auth_token":"your_token"}

3. Paste it in when prompted.

4. Press Enter to save.

Your token stays private

Credentials are read interactively (not as command-line arguments), so your auth token stays out of your shell history. They’re stored in ~/.buzzrc with read/write permissions for your user only.

Multiple accounts

Logging in as a username buzz hasn’t seen adds it alongside your existing accounts rather than replacing them. Goals from every account appear together — in the TUI grid and in every command — and a goal shared by two accounts is shown once.

buzz auth login          # paste alice's credentials
buzz auth login          # paste bob's credentials
buzz auth list           # alice (primary), bob
buzz auth logout bob     # remove an account

Logging in again as a username you already have refreshes that account’s token in place.

Where the same goal slug exists on more than one account, buzz shows it qualified (alice/read, bob/read) instead of twice over as read, and commands that name a goal accept the same qualifier:

buzz add alice/read 30

To act as one account for a whole command, use the global --account flag — it scopes reads and writes alike:

buzz --account bob today
buzz --account bob add read 30

The primary account — the first one you authenticated as — is the one used by commands that name no goal: buzz charge, buzz api, and buzz create (unless you qualify the new goal’s slug).

Re-authenticating

The interactive TUI auto-prompts for credentials on first run, so you typically only need buzz auth login to re-authenticate or when a subcommand reports that no configuration was found.

Piped input is also supported for scripting:

buzz auth login < creds.json

See buzz auth login in the command reference for details.