Environment Variables

Variable	Required	Default	Description
HLE_API_KEY	No	—	API key for tunnel authentication. Alternative to --api-key flag.

Setting your API key

You can provide your API key in three ways (in order of priority):

1. CLI flag: --api-key hle_xxx
2. Environment variable: HLE_API_KEY
3. Config file: ~/.config/hle/config.toml (saved automatically after first connection)

# Set in your shell profile (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.)
export HLE_API_KEY=hle_your_key_here

Config file

After your first successful tunnel connection, the client saves your API key to ~/.config/hle/config.toml:

[auth]
api_key = "hle_your_key_here"

This means subsequent hle expose commands will work without specifying the key.