CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-drive-api
hendry
hendry

Reputation: 10843

How to Download G Suite docs/sheets to pdf/xls programatically?

I'm trying to download a Google doc to PDF or Sheet to XLS given an ID programmatically from the CLI.

Steps I've tried so far:

  1. Contact support, but can't see a (?) help icon
  2. Google for 10 minutes... I think Google Drive API does this (not sure)
  3. Enable the Google Drive API
  4. Signed up for a GCP project
  5. Navigated thought the UI to enable the API
  6. Trying the GET API results in 400 Invalid field selection using the fields for the ID of the document

I'm a bit stuck now and I am not sure how to proceed. Any suggestions?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 231

Answers (1)

jdsalaro
jdsalaro

Reputation: 388

Warning: hopefully informative wall of text ahead! I've also uploaded the full Jupyter Notebook for you to clone and run here since, as you've realized, putting this sort of stuff together can be challenging.

Since we're going to be exporting files via the google drive API, we need credentials for that scope as detailed in https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/reference/files/export#auth.

However, first we need to choose an authentication method as detailed in https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2#scenarios.

Since you mentioned creating a GCP project, I assume you're interested in using a GCP service account as detailed in https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2#serviceaccount

You can create a service account at https://console.developers.google.com/apis/credentials or as explained in https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2/service-account#creatinganaccount

Make sure to enable domain-wide-delegation for that service account while creating it and grant it https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive scope under https://admin.google.com/ac/owl/domainwidedelegation since you otherwise won't be able to impersonate other users, including yourself, and download their files.

We then use the SERVICE_ACCOUNT_FILE we just downloaded and the SCOPES we defined to create a Credentials object.

However, you'll need to first install the Python bindings for the Google API as per https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/quickstart/python (pip3 install --upgrade google-api-python-client google-auth-httplib2 google-auth-oauthlib)

With that, the following should be enough to authenticate to the API:

from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from google.oauth2 import service_account

SCOPES = ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive']
SERVICE_ACCOUNT_FILE = 'credentials.json'

credentials = service_account.Credentials.from_service_account_file(SERVICE_ACCOUNT_FILE,
                                                      scopes=SCOPES)

# Remember, you must have created credentials.json with domain-wide delegation!
credentials = credentials.with_subject('[email protected]')

# We then build a drive_v3 service using the credentials we just created

service = build('drive', 'v3', credentials=credentials)

We can access the files resource as shown in https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/reference/files/get and request the metadata of a file to which [email protected] has access https://docs.google.com/document/d/fileId/edit. In your case fileId=141g8UkQfdMQSTfIn475gHj1ezZVV16f5ONDxpWrrvts.

files = service.files()
print(service.files().get(fileId='1U3eMevKxTwDxzvOBUsqa36zvwBzKPVYOFgy3k_9vxb8').execute())

{'kind': 'drive#file', 'id': '1U3eMevKxTwDxzvOBUsqa36zvwBzKPVYOFgy3k_9vxb8', 'name': 'empty', 'mimeType': 'application/vnd.google-apps.document'}

We access the files resource again but this time to export the file as detailed in https://developers.google.com/resources/api-libraries/documentation/drive/v3/python/latest/drive_v3.files.html#export This could also be achieved using https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/manage-downloads.

Valid MIME types are listed in https://developers.google.com/drive/api/v3/ref-export-formats.

fconr = files.export(fileId='1U3eMevKxTwDxzvOBUsqa36zvwBzKPVYOFgy3k_9vxb8',
mimeType='application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document')

fcont = fconr.execute()

print('{}...'.format(fcont[:10]))

file = open("/tmp/sample.doc", "wb")
file.write(fcont)
file.close()

b'MN\xc30\x10\x85O\xc0\x1d"'...

As you can see, fcont contains a binary blob that corresponds to the document and of which I'm showing the first 10 bytes. Finally, the blob is saved to sample.doc.

ls -alh1 /tmp/sample.doc

-rw-rw-r-- 1 jdsalaro jdsalaro 6,0K Jan 20 23:38 /tmp/sample.doc

As mentioned above, I encourage you to experiment with the Jupyter notebook once you've created the service account with domain-wide delegation, have saved it to credentials.json and have granted it the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive scope.

Upvotes: 1

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