Read a Google Sheet with Python using API Key instead of OAuth Client ID [Python]

Question

While there are several useful articles on how to use OAuth Client IDs to generate credentials needed for reading and writing to Google Sheets, I have been unable to make sense of how one would use the alternative API Key (token) in such a context.

I've blindly attempted to simply pass the token string into gspread.authorize(TOKEN) but, not surprisingly, received an error: AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'access_token'

Thanks in advance for any advice

Answer 1

First of all, the Google Sheet api can use Api key.
The main difference between Api key and OAuth 2.0 is that the Api key can only access public data.

For REST http request, You can append the query parameter key=yourAPIKey to all request URLs.

For python, see the google-api-python-client library's reference.
The build() function has a parameter named developerKey.
I wrote a simple example which is modified from the offical quickstart.

#!/usr/bin/env python

from __future__ import print_function
import httplib2
import os

from apiclient import discovery


def main(key=None):
    discoveryUrl ='https://sheets.googleapis.com/$discovery/rest?version=v4'
    service = discovery.build(
        'sheets',
        'v4',
        http=httplib2.Http(),
        discoveryServiceUrl=discoveryUrl,
        developerKey=key)

    spreadsheetId = '1BxiMVs0XRA5nFMdKvBdBZjgmUUqptlbs74OgvE2upms'
    rangeName = 'Class Data!A2:E'
    result = service.spreadsheets().values().get(
        spreadsheetId=spreadsheetId, range=rangeName).execute()
    values = result.get('values', [])

    if not values:
        print('No data found.')
    else:
        print('Name, Major:')
        for row in values:
            # Print columns A and E, which correspond to indices 0 and 4.
            print('%s, %s' % (row[0], row[4]))


if __name__ == '__main__':
    from sys import argv

    if len(argv) == 2:
        main(key=argv[1])
    else:
        main()

Some useful offical links.
https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/guides/authorizing
https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/python/auth/api-keys

However，most popular third library based on offical library does not expose the developerKey parameter.