Google API Service Accounts with Drive SDK

3
votes

I'm looking for some clarification on accessing Google docs/Drive SDK via a Service Account. I have everything set up in the API Console and I can successfully generate an access token via the JWT process and indeed I can issue requests to either drive SDK or the Docs List API to get a listing of documents. However, the document listing is always empty, I was expecting to see all the documents in my Google Drive. I am obviously not understanding fully what a service account gives you. If I upload a document via the Service Account then it does show up correctly, but is not visible in my Google Drive, it's as if the Service Account is a totally separate black box.

The reason I want to use Service Accounts is that I have a service running that needs to upload documents to various clients Google Docs accounts, without them having to go through the OAuth dance as there will be no UI interaction at all. Is this possible with Google docs. I was hoping that they could just send my the client_email and the certificate with the private key and I would be able to upload documents to that account.

Many thanks for your consideration

-Marshall

1
google-drive-apigoogle-docs-api

1 Answers

9
votes

Not sure whether you need the answer anymore, but I just faced with the same issue, came to this post. Found one solution which works in my case, so sharing with everyone here. The only integration point towards GoogleDrive in my case is document listing. When I first created my service account, it didn't work as well (just empty list all the time). What did I do to fix it:

  1. Go to MyDrive UI https://drive.google.com/#my-drive
  2. Checked all the documents I want to see on my website
  3. In the top menu clicked "More"->"Share..."->"Share..."
  4. In "Add people" section (new window "Sharing settings (N items)") I added service account email (format is "XXXXXX@@developer.gserviceaccount.com")
  5. Run document listing once again and got it working.