Trouble authenticating and writing to database locally - google-cloud-platform

Question

I'm having trouble authenticating and writing data to a spanner database locally. All imports are up to date - google.cloud, google.auth2, etc. I have tried having someone else run this and it works fine, so the problem seems to be something on my end - something wrong or misconfigured on my computer, maybe where the credentials are stored or something?
Anyone have any ideas?
from google.cloud import spanner
from google.api_core.exceptions import GoogleAPICallError
from google.api_core.datetime_helpers import DatetimeWithNanoseconds
import datetime
from google.oauth2 import service_account
def write_to(database):
record = [[
1041613562310836275,
'test_name'
]]
columns = ("id", "name")
insert_errors = []
try:
with database.batch() as batch:
batch.insert_or_update(
table = "guild",
columns = columns,
values = record,
)
except GoogleAPICallError as e:
print(f'error: {e}')
insert_errors.append(e.message)
pass
return insert_errors
if __name__ == "__main__":
credentials = service_account.Credentials.from_service_account_file(r'path\to\a.json')
instance_id = 'instance-name'
database_id = 'database-name'
spanner_client = spanner.Client(project='project-name', credentials=credentials)
print(f'spanner creds: {spanner_client.credentials}')
instance = spanner_client.instance(instance_id)
database = instance.database(database_id)
insert_errors = write_to(database)
some credential tests:
creds = service_account.Credentials.from_service_account_file(a_json)
<google.oauth2.service_account.Credentials at 0x...>
spanner_client.credentials
<google.auth.credentials.AnonymousCredentials at 0x...>
spanner_client.credentials.signer_email
AttributeError: 'AnonymousCredentials' object has no attribute 'signer_email'
creds.signer_email
'...#....iam.gserviceaccount.com'
spanner.Client().from_service_account_json(a_json).credentials
<google.auth.credentials.AnonymousCredentials object at 0x...>

Answer 1

The most common reason for this is that you have accidentally set (or forgot to unset) the environment variable SPANNER_EMULATOR_HOST. If this environment variable has been set, the client library will try to connect to the emulator instead of Cloud Spanner. This will cause the client library to wait for a long time while trying to connect to the emulator (assuming that the emulator is not running on your machine). Unset the environment variable to fix this problem.
Note: This environment variable will only affect Cloud Spanner client libraries, which is why other Google Cloud product will work on the same machine. The script will also in most cases work on other machines, as they are unlikely to have this environment variable set.