# Authentication

Elastic Cloud APIs support key-based authentication.
You must [create an API key](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/cloud/current/ec-api-authentication.html) and use the encoded value in the request header.            
For convenience, you can export your API key into your shell environment:

```
export EC_API_KEY="YOUR_GENERATED_API_KEY"
```

For example, the following `curl` command retrieves a list of your deployments:

```
curl -H "Authorization: ApiKey $EC_API_KEY" https://api.elastic-cloud.com/api/v1/deployments
```