Access a Google Drive spreadsheet in Ruby on Rails

Question

I'm trying to get the content of a Google Drive spreadsheet, but I can't seem to find a gem that can do it easily. I tried google-drive-ruby, but it involves a step in which I have to get an auth token from Google's website. This is not very helpful, as I have to do all this server-side. Apparently there was a login method in previous versions of the gem, but got removed.

Is there any way of doing this? Do I have to use OAuth to get a token and pass that token onto google-drive-ruby?

Answer 1

I managed to get an answer on Reddit. You need a Service Account and to share the document with your service app's email. The p12 key has to be stored somewhere as well.

# gem install google-api-client -v 0.8.6 # upper versions are not compatible with this code

require "google/api_client"

@email = "[email protected]"
@key = "path/to/key.p12"

key = Google::APIClient::KeyUtils.load_from_pkcs12(@key, 'notasecret')

auth = Signet::OAuth2::Client.new(
  token_credential_uri: 'https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token',
  audience: 'https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token',
  scope: ["https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive", "https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds/"].join(' '),
  issuer: @email,
  access_type: 'offline',
  signing_key: key
)

auth.fetch_access_token!
puts auth.access_token