Notes

Setup

Okay so apparently to even be able to do this locally we need to create a project on the google cloud console

Setup Google Cloud Project

• Go to cloud console
• Create new project
• Go to APIs & Services
• Search for and enable APIS you need

For this one we just need the Google Drive API

Configure OAuth Consent Screen

• Go to APIs & Services -> OAuth consent screen
• Choose External User Type (unless youre in a Google Workspace organization)
• Fill in required information
• Can skip scopes
• Add your email as a test user

An external user is any test user with a google account. The app will start in testing mode and will only be available to users you add to the list of test users

Create OAuth 2.0 Client Credentials

• Go to APIs & Services -> Credentials
• Create Credentials -> OAuth client ID
• Choose Desktop application as application type
• Give it a name
• Download the JSON file

Simple Google Drive Authentication

Concepts:

Authentication

Pickle File

• a way to serialize (convert to byte stream) and deserialize (convert back to a python object) python objects.
• saves the exact state of a python object to a file
• why use a pickle when dealing with authentication
  • credentials object contains important authentication information:
    • access tokens
    • refresh tokens
    • token expiration times
    • other oauth2 related data
  • we want to save this exact state so users dont have to re-authenticate everytime they run this script
  • pickle preserves all complex object data structure exactly as is
• Benefits
  • Simpler Code
  • Preservers all object attributes exactly
  • No need to manually reconstruct objects
  • Handles complex python objects naturally
• Cons
  • Not secure against malicious data / untrusted files
  • Not compatible across different python versions
  • Files are binary, not human-readable like JSON
  • Platform/OS-dependent

Alternative method to using pickle file

# Instead of pickle, we could save just the basic token info to a JSON file:
import json

# Saving
token_info = {
    'token': creds.token,
    'refresh_token': creds.refresh_token,
    'token_uri': creds.token_uri,
    'expiry': creds.expiry.isoformat() if creds.expiry else None
}
with open('token.json', 'w') as f:
    json.dump(token_info, f)

# Loading
with open('token.json', 'r') as f:
    token_info = json.load(token_info)
    # Would need to reconstruct the Credentials object
    creds = Credentials(
        token=token_info['token'],
        refresh_token=token_info['refresh_token'],
        token_uri=token_info['token_uri'],
        # Would need to parse expiry back to datetime
        expiry=parse_datetime(token_info['expiry']) if token_info['expiry'] else None
    )