CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythongoogle-apigoogle-drive-apigoogle-oauth
biocompamateur
biocompamateur

Reputation: 35

Google Drive API: Avoiding Manual Authentication

I want to write a python script that can connect to Google Drive API without having to manually authenticate on every device the script is run on.

I am writing some python code for a research study that is going to be run at various study locations. For data privacy reasons, we cannot store data locally and need to write it to the cloud (ideally Google Drive). A member of our team will not present at all locations the software is being run, and thus any sort of initial manual authentication (entering username and password at the different sites for OAuth) is really off of the table for us.

I've looked into the Google Drive API (Python), and am wondering if there is a way for a device running my script to get a Refresh token (and subsequent Access tokens) to modify a Google Sheet without needling to manually authenticate on each device.

Is there any way to make this possible with the Google Drive API (by having some sort of 'secret' that the code could store)? If not, are there any other cloud services that may be able to accommodate this?

Additionally, the python script is being run as part of an executable (produced from Vizard, probably irrelevant but mentioning it just in case)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 907

Answers (1)

pinoyyid
pinoyyid

Reputation: 22286

Yes it can be done - see How do I authorise an app (web or installed) without user intervention?

However, it's probably a bad idea for two reasons. if you distribute code with embedded secrets (technically the secret is a Refresh Token), they tend not to stay secret for long. Secondly, there is the chance that the Refresh Token will expire and your users will be dead in the water.

I would suggest that you consider:-

  • A Service Account
  • Writing an OAuth proxy, which you can host for free on Google AppEngine, which puts all of the secret stuff on a server and from which your app can fetch Access Tokens as they are needed.

Upvotes: 1

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