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Installation & Setup

Complete setup guide for the fal CLI and development environment. This guide covers all platforms and authentication methods.

System Requirements

  • Python: 3.8 or later
  • Operating System: macOS, Linux, or Windows

Install the CLI

Using pip

Terminal window
pip install fal

Verify Installation

Check that the CLI installed correctly:

Terminal window
fal --version

You should see the version number printed.

Authentication

Terminal window
fal auth login

This opens your browser to authenticate with fal. Once complete, your credentials are saved locally.

💡 Tip: If you’re a member of multiple teams, the login process will prompt you to select which team account you want to use as your default. Choose carefully, as this affects which resources you can access and deploy to.

Option 2: API Key

Create an API key at API Keys with the ADMIN scope. If creating a key for a team, make sure to select your team on the top left corner.

Set it as an environment variable:

Terminal window
export FAL_KEY="your-api-key-here"

Or add it to your shell profile (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.) to persist across sessions.

Managing API Keys

When working with multiple API keys, you can use the fal profile command to save your API keys and switch between them.

Team Accounts

After authentication, you can switch between different teams or your personal account using the fal team command.

View Available Teams

To list teams that you are a member of:

Terminal window
fal team list
┏━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Default ┃ Team             ┃ Full Name         ┃ ID                              ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ *       │ myteam           │ My Team           │ github|1kbr8zjkk377xfs5tl2erl4x │
│         │ otherteam        │ Other Team        │ github|v11vo11w2kqakm99ke00258q │
└─────────┴──────────────────┴───────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────┘

The * indicates your currently active team.

Switch Teams

To switch to a different team:

Terminal window
fal team set otherteam

To switch back to your personal account:

Terminal window
fal team unset

Verify Authentication

Test your authentication setup:

Terminal window
fal auth whoami

This should display your account information, including your current team (if any). Example output:

User: [email protected]
Team: myteam (My Team)

If you see an error, double-check your authentication method and API key configuration.

Upgrading

Keep your CLI up to date:

Terminal window
pip install --upgrade fal

Check for breaking changes in the changelog.

Getting Help