Configuration

airbnb needs almost no configuration: it runs anonymously against public data out of the box. The settings below let you tune politeness, set the locale and currency, and choose where data lands.

Defaults

Setting	Default	Flag
Requests	paced and retried on 429/5xx	--rate, --retries
Per-request timeout	30s	--timeout
Locale	en	--locale
Currency	USD	--currency
Adults for a price quote	1	--adults
On-disk cache	under the data directory	--no-cache to bypass

The public web key

Every live surface is the logged-out web client's own data plane. Airbnb's pages address its internal GraphQL endpoint with a public web key the site ships in its own bundle, the same constant any visitor's browser sends. airbnb uses that key automatically and refreshes it from the live site when reachable, so there is nothing to set.

--api-key overrides that public key if you have a reason to. It is not a credential: there is no signed API, no affiliate or partner backend, no consumer id, and no private key. There is no API to fall back to when a request is walled, so the only remedy for the edge wall is to run from a residential or mobile network. See what anonymous access reaches.

The data directory

Caches and any record store live under one data directory, chosen in this order:

1. --data-dir
2. AIRBNB_DATA_DIR
3. $XDG_DATA_HOME/airbnb
4. ~/.local/share/airbnb

Environment variables

Every flag has an environment fallback, prefixed AIRBNB_ in upper case with dashes as underscores. For example:

export AIRBNB_RATE=1s          # same as --rate 1s
export AIRBNB_CURRENCY=EUR     # same as --currency EUR
export AIRBNB_DATA_DIR=~/data/airbnb

Flags win over environment variables, which win over the built-in defaults.

Sending records to a store

--db tees every emitted record into a store as a side effect of reading, so a session fills a local database without a separate import step:

airbnb host listings 555 --db out.db        # SQLite file
airbnb host listings 555 --db 'postgres://...'