# How to create an api key on the admin panel **URL:** \ **Category:** Development\ **Tags:** rest-api\ **Created:** [May 13, 2018, 11:15pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-create-an-api-key-on-the-admin-panel/87383 "2018-05-13T23:15:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 5
**Author:** ![blake](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/blake/32/157322_2.png) [@blake](https://meta.discourse.org/u/blake)\ **Post date:** [May 14, 2018, 5:41pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-create-an-api-key-on-the-admin-panel/87383/5 "2018-05-14T17:41:13Z")
> [@mattman](#): > > Okay. So what do the API docs mean when they say “To become authenticated you will need to create an API Key from the admin panel”? What it means is that when you start with a brand new install of Discourse you should not have an api key and when you go to the API tab it should look like this: ![image](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/2/1/215abdeac50030ccaeb602ff9d4273fb7dc9e807.png) So you will need to click that key icon to create a system wide api key. I’ll work on improving the docs about how to create a system key and how to make user api keys. > [@mattman](#): > > I tried using that one API key That key most definitely should work, most likely something else was the issue and you might need to provide more info with how you made the api request so that we can help you troubleshoot. Also please check if the content-type was set to form-data. > [@mattman](#): > > So I’d like to ask about how to get the user’s notification count but I can’t even get authenticated yet. You will need to hit the [`/notifications.json`](https://docs.discourse.org/#tag/Notifications%2Fpaths%2F~1notifications.json%2Fget) endpoint and pass in the user you want notifications for in the `api_username` field. --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-create-an-api-key-on-the-admin-panel/87383)._