CODEWITHSUNDEEP
authenticationgoogle-cloud-platformgoogle-workspace
Vee6
Vee6

Reputation: 1577

Can GSuite be accessed by means of API key?

Suppose I have a simple node backend application which when ran needs to connect to a specific GSuite instance, query some things (users, groups, etc.) and then close and not run again until needed, which can mean either a very long time or a few seconds. From what I gathered from Google's documentation there may be multiple ways of doing this, including having an OAuth client and follow the whole flow in setting it up, managing token lifecycle, etc.

However I do NOT want to go with this option for now for various reasons and I am wondering if there is any way of getting access by means of an API Key / secret, like many other 3rd party services allow nowadays. Simply put I would like to generate a key pair somewhere on GSuite, no idea where, and use those keys for auth instead of OAuth, something Google suggests is possible, both on the GSuite Admin app (with a broken link that leads nowhere - not surprising) and on GCloud API and Credentials subpage where you setup credentials (however there it says that API Keys can only be used for very limited resources, none of them having anything to do with GSuite).

Upvotes: 0

Views: 201

Answers (1)

Matt Wilbert
Matt Wilbert

Reputation: 384

I think your best option is to see if what you want to do can be done by a service account. You can create a service account, grant administrator privileges to it in GSuite, enable some APIs, and then that account can do a lot of things without using OAuth directly. The credentials for the service account can then be provided to your application as a json key file, which it can use to authenticate to GSuite. You can also grant service accounts permissions to specific objects like files in Drive, but it doesn't sound like that would be sufficient to your needs.

A guide that may be helpful in the details of how to do this is https://m.fin.com/2017/10/04/navigating-the-google-suite-directory-api/

Upvotes: 1

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