Using OAuth2 for Authorization

Using OAuth2 for Authorization

OAuth Credentials

OAuth credentials can be generated in several different ways using the oauth2client library provided by Google. If you are editing spreadsheets for yourself then the easiest way to generate credentials is to use Signed Credentials stored in your application (see example below). If you plan to edit spreadsheets on behalf of others then visit the Google OAuth2 documentation for more information.

Using Signed Credentials

1. Head to Google Developers Console and create a new project (or select the one you have.)
2. Under “API & auth”, in the API enable “Drive API”.

3. Go to “Credentials” and choose “New Credentials > Service Account Key”.

You will automatically download a JSON file with this data.

This is how this file may look like:

{
    "private_key_id": "2cd … ba4",
    "private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\nNrDyLw … jINQh/9\n-----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n",
    "client_email": "473 … [email protected]",
    "client_id": "473 … hd.apps.googleusercontent.com",
    "type": "service_account"
}

You’ll need client_email and private_key.

5. Install oauth2client:

pip install --upgrade oauth2client

Depending on your system setup you may need to install PyOpenSSL:

pip install PyOpenSSL

6. Now you can read this file, and use the data when constructing your credentials:

import gspread
from oauth2client.service_account import ServiceAccountCredentials

scope = ['https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds']

credentials = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_name('gspread-april-2cd … ba4.json', scope)

gc = gspread.authorize(credentials)

wks = gc.open("Where is the money Lebowski?").sheet1

If using oauth2client < 2.0.0

import json
import gspread
from oauth2client.client import SignedJwtAssertionCredentials

json_key = json.load(open('gspread-april-2cd … ba4.json'))
scope = ['https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds']

credentials = SignedJwtAssertionCredentials(json_key['client_email'], json_key['private_key'].encode(), scope)

gc = gspread.authorize(credentials)

wks = gc.open("Where is the money Lebowski?").sheet1

Note: Python2 users do not need to encode json_key['private_key'] due to str and bytes not being differentiated.

7. Go to Google Sheets and share your spreadsheet with an email you have in your json_key['client_email']. Otherwise you’ll get a SpreadsheetNotFound exception when trying to open it.

Troubleshooting

oauth2client.client.CryptoUnavailableError: No crypto library available

If you’re getting the “No crypto library available” exception, make sure you have PyOpenSSL library installed in your environment.

Custom Credentials Objects

If you have another method of authenicating you can easily hack a custom credentials object.

class Credentials (object):
  def __init__ (self, access_token=None):
    self.access_token = access_token

  def refresh (self, http):
    # get new access_token
    # this only gets called if access_token is None