Get a DigitalOcean API token

The five-minute walk from no account to the token the setup wizard asks for when you pick DigitalOcean, and what that token actually is.

You will be able to make a DigitalOcean account and hand the wizard a token that can build in Sydney.

Crads-AI is self-hosted: your assistant runs on a server in your own hosting account. The setup wizard offers two hosting companies, Hetzner and DigitalOcean, and builds the server on whichever you pick. This page is the DigitalOcean one; get a Hetzner API token is the other.

Why DigitalOcean, when Hetzner is cheaper at every size? Location. DigitalOcean has a Sydney datacentre, along with Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Bangalore. If you are in Australia and want your data to stay in Australia, this is the way to have that. The wizard defaults to Sydney when you pick DigitalOcean.

To build on your account the wizard needs an API token from you. The token is the key to your DigitalOcean account. It stays on your computer, the app sends it only to DigitalOcean's own API, and you can revoke it at any time. Treat it like a password all the same.

1. Make a DigitalOcean account#

Go to cloud.digitalocean.com and sign up with your email. Confirm the email, then add a payment method: the server is billed to you by DigitalOcean directly, in US dollars, roughly twenty-four to ninety-six dollars a month depending on the size you pick in the wizard, and nothing is charged until a server actually exists.

DigitalOcean sometimes asks new accounts to verify identity before they can create servers. That check is theirs, not ours; if it appears, complete it and come back.

2. Open the API page#

In the control panel's left sidebar, near the bottom, choose API. The Tokens tab is the one you want. (DigitalOcean calls a server a "droplet"; the wizard says "server" throughout, and they are the same thing.)

3. Generate the token#

Press Generate New Token. Name it something you will recognise later ("crads-ai" is fine), and pick an expiry you are comfortable with: the wizard needs the token only while it builds, so a short expiry costs you nothing, and a token that has expired simply means generating another before the next build.

Give it Full Access. This matters: a read-only token can look at your account but cannot build anything in it, and the wizard will refuse it. If you would rather scope it by hand, the wizard needs to read your account, regions and sizes, create and read SSH keys, and create, read and delete droplets.

4. Copy it straight away#

DigitalOcean shows a token exactly once, at the moment it is generated. Copy it before closing the dialog and paste it into the wizard. If you lose it, do not hunt for it; generate a fresh one and delete the old from the same screen.

What the wizard does with it#

The app checks the token against DigitalOcean with a read-only call before offering to build, shows you the real locations and machine sizes your account offers with DigitalOcean's own list prices, and then creates one server with your own SSH key as its only key. The token is held in the app's memory for that run and is never written to disk or sent anywhere except api.digitalocean.com. If you ever want to withdraw it, revoke the token in the DigitalOcean control panel; the server it built keeps running regardless, because the server is yours, not the token's.

One difference from Hetzner worth knowing: DigitalOcean does not stop you creating two servers with the same name. The wizard tags each server it makes so that, if your connection drops at the wrong moment, it finds the server it already made rather than making a second one.