Credential System

How Open Notebook stores, encrypts and provisions AI provider credentials — from the settings UI down to Esperanto model instantiation. This is the single reference for the subsystem; the frontend and backend halves are documented together on purpose.

Overview

Users can configure provider credentials through the UI instead of environment variables. Keys are stored as individual Credential records in SurrealDB, encrypted with Fernet, and resolved at model-provisioning time with a database-first, environment-variable-fallback strategy.

Settings UI ──► /credentials API ──► Credential record (encrypted, SurrealDB)
                                          │
                Model record ──credential─┘        (preferred: direct link)
                     │
        ModelManager.get_model()
                     │
        credential.to_esperanto_config()  ──►  Esperanto AIFactory
                     │
        (no linked credential?)
                     └──► key_provider.provision_provider_keys()  ──►  env vars ──► Esperanto

The Credential domain model (open_notebook/domain/credential.py)

• One record per credential (e.g. "My OpenAI Key", "Work Anthropic") — multiple credentials per provider are supported.
• Fields: name, provider, modalities, api_key (Pydantic SecretStr, masked in logs), plus provider-specific config (base_url, endpoint, api_version, mode-specific endpoints, project, location, credentials_path).
• api_key is encrypted with encrypt_value() before save and decrypted on read (get() / get_all() are overridden). Encryption requires OPEN_NOTEBOOK_ENCRYPTION_KEY (see content-processing.md for the encryption utility itself).
• to_esperanto_config() builds the config dict passed to Esperanto's AIFactory.create_*.
• provider_config.py still exists only to migrate legacy ProviderConfig records.

Provisioning: two paths

1. Credential-linked model (preferred). A Model record has a credential field pointing at a Credential. ModelManager.get_model() calls credential.to_esperanto_config() and passes the config directly — no env var mutation, multiple credentials per provider work naturally.
2. Env-var fallback (open_notebook/ai/key_provider.py). When a model has no linked credential, provision_provider_keys(provider) copies DB-stored keys into os.environ so Esperanto can read them; pre-existing env vars are left untouched when no DB config exists. The PROVIDER_CONFIG map in key_provider.py defines the env-var ↔ config-field mapping for simple providers; multi-field providers (Vertex, Azure, OpenAI-compatible) are handled by the dedicated _provision_vertex() / _provision_azure() / _provision_openai_compatible() functions.

The API surface (api/routers/credentials.py)

CRUD plus lifecycle operations: POST /credentials/{id}/test (connection check), /discover (list available models), /register-models (create Model records from discovery), and two migration endpoints (/migrate-from-env, /migrate-from-provider-config). Swagger at /docs documents the shapes.

Supported providers (17) are enforced by the SupportedProvider Literal in api/models.py, kept in sync with three other locations (frontend ALL_PROVIDERS, connection_tester.TEST_MODELS, credentials_service.PROVIDER_ENV_CONFIG):

• Simple API key: openai, anthropic, google, groq, mistral, deepseek, xai, openrouter, voyage, elevenlabs, deepgram, dashscope, minimax
• URL-based: ollama
• Multi-field: azure, vertex, openai_compatible

Security properties:

• API key values are never returned by any endpoint — only metadata (has_api_key, counts).
• Every URL field passes validate_url() (SSRF protection); private IPs/localhost are allowed by design for self-hosted services (Ollama, LM Studio). Hostname resolution runs in asyncio.to_thread to avoid blocking the event loop.
• Connection testing of Vertex credentials collapses "file missing / not JSON / wrong shape" errors into one generic message so the tester can't be used as a filesystem oracle.

Connection testing (open_notebook/ai/connection_tester.py)

test_provider_connection() makes a minimal API call using the cheapest model per provider (TEST_MODELS map). URL-based providers get a server ping instead (/api/tags for Ollama, /models for OpenAI-compatible). Error messages are normalized for the UI: 401 → "Invalid API key", rate-limit → success ("connection works"), model-not-found → success ("key valid").

Frontend half

• src/lib/api/credentials.ts — typed client mirroring the endpoints above. The Credential interface never carries the key value, only has_api_key.
• src/lib/hooks/use-credentials.ts — TanStack Query hooks (useCredentials, useCreateCredential, useTestCredential, …) with toast feedback. Mutations invalidate CREDENTIAL_QUERY_KEYS.all + provider/model keys; test results are kept in local state, not the query cache.

Migration paths

Both migration endpoints are idempotent summaries (migrated / skipped / errors):

• From env vars: creates Credential records for providers whose env vars are set.
• From legacy ProviderConfig: converts old singleton records into individual Credentials.