Cause of google vision API HTTP Forbidden error? Ruby (Rails) - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have been trying to get the google vision API to work in my rails application but keep getting a Net::HTTPForbidden response. I'm not really sure what is causing it since everything I have seems to be setup properly, I've tried generating new keys and still get the same error, any help would be appreciated. I replaced my API key with 'XXXXX_MY_API_KEY_XXXXX' in this post for obvious reasons, so that is not the issue, also have tried directly pasting in an image url in place of the 'img_url' so I don't think that that is related to the issue either.
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
require 'json'
def transcribe(img_url)
uri = URI.parse('https://vision.googleapis.com/v1/images:annotate?key=' + 'XXXXX_MY_API_KEY_XXXXX')
request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(uri)
request.content_type = 'application/json'
request.body = JSON.dump(
'requests' => [
{
'image' => {
'source' => {
'imageUri' => img_url
}
},
'features' => [
{
'type' => 'TEXT_DETECTION',
'maxResults' => 1,
'model' => 'builtin/latest'
}
]
}
]
)
req_options = {
use_ssl: uri.scheme == 'https'
}
response = Net::HTTP.start(uri.hostname, uri.port, req_options) do |http|
http.request(request)
end
p response
p response.code
p response.body
end

Answer 1

Ok, so after hours of messing around with this I finally figured out the issue. When you first try to use the api they will return a link to you that you have to visit to activate the specific API (vision in my case), I could not find this page through the ui on the google cloud control panel, only through the link. Even though the API key was active and unrestricted with billing setup it would not function without activating the specific API. Because I had commented out the response code/body I was only getting the status code for my API call and was not seeing the rest of the response, preventing me from finding the proper activation link.
This was a massive lapse of judgement on my part, hopefully this will help anyone who runs into a similar issue or is looking to integrate google vision API into a rails app and stumbles upon this thread, the code shown above works totally fine and is a much simpler approach to using the API when compared to the client library, just make sure that you have the specific API that you want to use enabled. Just because the API key is not restricted does not mean that you can simply use any of their APIs, I made sure to 'fix' (uncomment) the code I posted for anyone else who may find it useful.