How to use Drive API to impersonate a user without Google Apps for Work

Question

My organization has a project that is using Google Drive to store files. What we want to do is to show the contents of the Drive on a website.

I'm not really sure how to go about this. Most of the examples are showing authenticating the user accessing the site.

Right now, what I am thinking of doing is to use a service account. I have a Node app running a service account, which I just followed from the samples in the Node.js samples. I realized that the contents shown from running the app are the contents of the Drive of the service account.

What I wanted to happen was show the contents of the Drive that owns the project.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if you can get around authentication when it comes to standard User Accounts.

But you don't really need to impersonate a User Account. There is a alternative solution. From your User account, create a folder and move all the files needed by the app into it. Then share the folder with the service account and grant it edit access. To share the folder you'll need to know the email address of the service account which you can find in your Google Developer's Console. To get to the service account's page, click the menu icon (the triple bar) at the top left and select IAM Admin. On that page there should be a menu option for service accounts, when selected it will provide you with a list of all your service accounts and their corresponding email addresses.