CODEWITHSUNDEEP
githubgoogle-sheetsautomation
Yanirmr
Yanirmr

Reputation: 1032

What is the best way to version control a Google sheet using Github?

Our teamwork pipeline uses Google Sheets as a very basic database. We use it because it is a standard spreadsheet that can be accessed online and shared. Based on the exported CSV from this Google sheet, carry out any further analysis.

Since sharing work leads to mistakes, I have to restore the version that makes the mistake without losing the other changes. Since Google Sheets' version history isn't as useful as Git's, I want to put this spreadsheet (ideally, the CSV) under Github version control on an automatic basis. Would it be possible to do that?

I will need to get into the spreadsheet, export the CSV, and push it to the appropriate repository if I have to do that manually. I think it would be easy to automate. I'm not sure how to do it.

I appreciate your help.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 2500

Answers (2)

Jason Fulghum
Jason Fulghum

Reputation: 1045

DoltHub is an excellent fit for this use case where you have a spreadsheet being built collaboratively and you want the ability to see the full version history, audit where/when/who each cell's value came from, diff any versions of the spreadsheet, and much more. It's free to use DoltHub and you can easily export your data to CSV from the web, or pull it all down as a Dolt database and access everything locally.

Here's a DoltHub blog post that covers this exact use case in more detail: https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2022-07-15-so-you-want-spreadsheet-version-control/

If you haven't heard of DoltDB or DoltHub yet, here's a little more background...

DoltDB is the first versioned SQL relational database. It has all the power of a SQL database with all the versioning features of Git. That gives you a database that you can branch and fork, push and pull, merge and diff, just like a Git repository. It's open-source and written from the ground up in Go, and targets full MySQL compliance, so you can use it seamlessly with any tools that connect to a MySQL database.

DoltHub is an online site for finding and collaborating on datasets. The Git-style versioning features built into DoltDB enable easy and safe collaboration and gives you a Pull Request workflow for accepting changes, just like on GitHub. You can control if you want your dataset to be public or private with the free tier, and there's a Pro tier if you need to host private databases larger than 1GB. There's even a DoltLab product available for teams that need to keep their data on their own private network.

There's a very active and friendly DoltHub user community on Discord where the DoltHub dev team hangs out, too, if you have any questions/comments/feedback.

Upvotes: 2

Mike Steelson
Mike Steelson

Reputation: 15318

You do not need to export, your spreadsheet can be reached using endpoint as follows

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/##ssID##/gviz/tq?tqx=out:csv&sheet=##sheetName##

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions