Bring your own OAuth client or API key

Role of the OAuth client and API key

googledrive helps you obtain a token to work with the Google Drive API from R primarily through the drive_auth() function. Under the hood, that process relies on an OAuth client and secret, a.k.a. an “OAuth client”.

googledrive can also make unauthorized calls to the Google Drive API, for example accessing a file available to “Anyone with a link”, by sending an API key, instead of a user token.

If there is a problem with googledrive’s internal OAuth client or API key or if you would prefer to use your own, you can configure this. Below we describe how.

Get an OAuth client and tell googledrive about it

Follow the instructions in the gargle article How to get your own API credentials to get an OAuth client ID and secret. Now register it with googledrive.

Preferred method: Provide the path to the JSON file downloaded from the Google Cloud Platform Console.

drive_auth_configure(
  path = "/path/to/the/JSON/you/downloaded/from/google/dev/console.json"
)

It is also possible, though discouraged, to directly use the constructor gargle::gargle_oauth_client().

Confirm success and carry on! You can see the currently configured OAuth client like so:

drive_oauth_client()

You should see your own client there now.

For the rest of this R session, when you get a new token with drive_auth(), your OAuth client is used.

Get an API key and tell googledrive about it

Follow the instructions in the gargle article How to get your own API credentials to get an API key. You probably want to use the same GCP project to create both your OAuth client (above) and your API key. Now register it with googledrive.

drive_auth_configure(api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY_GOES_HERE")

Confirm success and carry on! You can see the currently configured API key like so:

drive_api_key()

You should see your own API key now.

For the rest of this R session, if you go into a de-authorized state via drive_deauth(), your API key will be sent with the request.