Error while importing Kaggle dataset on Colab

Question

When executing the following lines,

!pip install kaggle
!kaggle competitions download -c dogs-vs-cats -p /content/

I got the following error messages,

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/bin/kaggle", line 7, in <module>
from kaggle.cli import main
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/kaggle/__init__.py", line 23, in <module>
api.authenticate()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/kaggle/api/kaggle_api_extended.py", line 109, in authenticate
self._load_config(config_data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/kaggle/api/kaggle_api_extended.py", line 151, in _load_config
raise ValueError('Error: Missing %s in configuration.' % item)
ValueError: Error: Missing username in configuration.

I don't know what just happened...same lines just worked fine before. It's the first time I found this problem.

Answer 1

It suddenly stopped working here as well. Apparently, the kaggle api was not searching the kaggle.json file in the correct place. Since I was using the kaggle api inside a colab notebook, I was importing the kaggle.json like this:

from googleapiclient.discovery import build
import io, os
from googleapiclient.http import MediaIoBaseDownload
from google.colab import auth

auth.authenticate_user()

drive_service = build('drive', 'v3')
results = drive_service.files().list(
        q="name = 'kaggle.json'", fields="files(id)").execute()
kaggle_api_key = results.get('files', [])

filename = "/content/.kaggle/kaggle.json"
os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(filename), exist_ok=True)

request = drive_service.files().get_media(fileId=kaggle_api_key[0]['id'])
fh = io.FileIO(filename, 'wb')
downloader = MediaIoBaseDownload(fh, request)
done = False
while done is False:
    status, done = downloader.next_chunk()
    print("Download %d%%." % int(status.progress() * 100))
os.chmod(filename, 600)

It worked just fine. But now, the kaggle api searches the kaggle.json in this location:

~/.kaggle/kaggle.json

So, I just had to move/copy the file I downloaded to the right place:

!mkdir ~/.kaggle
!cp /content/.kaggle/kaggle.json ~/.kaggle/kaggle.json

And it started working again.