private key missing

[cyrilgarcia009]

I tried running the main.py script to get started, I see the following error when running, maybe it would be useful to add in the readme how to add this private key?

TypeError: expected str, bytes or os.PathLike object, not NoneType

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Exception Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[5], line 16
14 raise FileNotFoundError(f"Private key file not found at {KEYFILE}")
15 except Exception as e:
---> 16 raise Exception(f"Error loading private key: {str(e)}")

Exception: Error loading private key: expected str, bytes or os.PathLike object, not NoneType

[cyrilgarcia009]

I managed to make it work by creating .txt files with the private keys and key id, not sure if this is best practice so I thought it would be helpful to explain.

[YichengYang-Ethan]

Ran into the same when getting started — Kalshi expects an RSA private key PEM (downloaded from the dashboard when you generate the API key), not the API key string itself.

Load it like this:

from cryptography.hazmat.primitives import serialization

with open("kalshi_private.pem", "rb") as f:
    private_key = serialization.load_pem_private_key(f.read(), password=None)

Then pass private_key (the loaded object, not the file path) to your KalshiHttpClient along with the key_id. The README hint about file format would help — happy to PR a docs section if useful.