Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. How do I authenticate to AWS or GCP from my local machine?

Holonomy uses the industry standard for cloud authentication by integrating natively with your cloud provider's official CLI tools. We strongly recommend against using .env files to store long-lived cloud credentials (like AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID or GCP .json files) on your local machine.

Google Cloud (GCP)

If Holonomy is configured to use GCP KMS or Cloud Storage, you need to authenticate your local development environment using Application Default Credentials (ADC).

Run the following command in your terminal:

gcloud auth application-default login

This will open your browser and authenticate you. Holonomy will automatically detect the resulting credentials in ~/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json without any further configuration.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

If Holonomy is configured to use AWS KMS or S3, you should authenticate using AWS SSO.

Run the following command in your terminal:

aws sso login

Holonomy will automatically detect your active SSO session from ~/.aws/sso/cache.

2. Why am I getting "Failed to initialize GCP KMS Adapter" or a Panic Exception?

If you see an error like this: PanicException: Failed to initialize GCP KMS Adapter. Are you logged in to GCP? Try running gcloud auth application-default login.

This means Holonomy correctly read your .holonomy.toml configuration and determined that you are using GCP, but the underlying GCP SDK could not find your credentials. To fix this, simply run gcloud auth application-default login in your terminal and restart your Python kernel.

3. Why am I getting "environment variable is required" for Policy Bucket or KMS Key ID?

If you are running Holonomy inside a Jupyter notebook, make sure that you have a .holonomy.toml file located somewhere in that directory tree (either in the same folder or in any parent folder up to the root of the project). Holonomy will automatically crawl upwards from your current working directory to find the .holonomy.toml file to resolve these settings.