Add support for the keys_api module

+1

Keys API has change name to Keys: http://drupal.org/project/keys.

If you use local domain routing on your development machine—so that even during development on your local machine you are still browsing to http://www.example.com/—this issue does not occur and you can use the same API key during development and deployment. For a whole range of reasons, anyone who is developing on http://localhost/ should certainly look into this... see VirtualHostX or MAMP Pro on the Mac, similar products on other platforms.

If there is still interest in this feature, I may look at implementing it as being optionally supported if the Keys module is installed... However, at this point new features will only be added to the Google Maps location 6.x-2.x-dev branch (to be created), so unless someone else chooses to backport it this will not be available on 5.x sorry.

In fact, Google states that if you are surfing from http://localhost you do not need a Google Maps API key. The only exception to this appears to be if you are using a specific port number locally, such as http://localhost:1234 for development—in that case you need to apply for a key.

Since in the latter case I can't see that you'd want to ship out to your client a database installed with your custom localhost development key, I can't see there is a problem here. On that basis, I can't see much point in adding Keys module support—the whole purpose to this module is to be a simple alternative to the more complex options for a basic use case.

At this point therefore I'm going to close this issue. Feel free to re-open if you have additional information that might change the balance of the discussion.

See also #374967: Need to replace Google Maps API key when deploying from http://localhost to live site

keys support allows google maps to work for domains with and without the www. on the domain name.

Well... maybe one day. But almost certainly only in 6.x-2.x and above.