GoogleWebAuthorizationBroker.AuthorizeAsync freezes

Question

I have a C# .net web application that I use to upload videos to Youtube. This worked about 6 months ago but now it has stopped working. The following code just hangs when I launch my website via Visual Studio on my local computer:

     UserCredential credential;
    using (var auth_stream = new FileStream(Server.MapPath("~/YouTube/client_secrets.json"), FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
    {
        credential = await GoogleWebAuthorizationBroker.AuthorizeAsync(
            GoogleClientSecrets.Load(auth_stream).Secrets,
            // This OAuth 2.0 access scope allows an application to upload files to the
            // authenticated user's YouTube channel, but doesn't allow other types of access.
            new[] { YouTubeService.Scope.YoutubeUpload },
            "user",
            CancellationToken.None
        );
    }

I have also tried the following after looking at other posts on stack overflow:

     UserCredential credentialS;
     using (var auth_stream = new FileStream(Server.MapPath("~/YouTube/client_secrets.json"), FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
     {
         credentialS = await GoogleWebAuthorizationBroker.AuthorizeAsync(
             new ClientSecrets
             {
                 ClientId = "blahblah-myDetailsBlahBLah.apps.googleusercontent.com",
                 ClientSecret = "myClientSecret",
             },
             // This OAuth 2.0 access scope allows an application to upload files to the
             // authenticated user's YouTube channel, but doesn't allow other types of access.
             new[] { YouTubeService.Scope.YoutubeUpload },
             "user",
             CancellationToken.None
         );
     }

I also notived that I was using version 1.7.0-beta of the Google APIs so I upgraded via PackageManager console to version 1.8.2.

I also generated a new Client Secret via the Google Developer Console and used that in my website.

But after trying these steps the call to GoogleWebAuthorizationBroker.AuthorizeAsync still hangs. I notice that my website in my local browser refreshes as if its attempting to connect but the call is never seccessful.

How can I solve this??

Answer 1

I also ran into this issue using the Google Calendar API.

My application is scraping notices from various online resources and posting them to a shared google calendar.

It works fine in a development environment but didn't when I deployed it to a VM where it is running as a windows scheduled task every 15 minutes using a service account in that VM.

I remember that when first setting it up I had to go through the authorization step in the browser but it wasn't being triggered when run as a scheduled task.

I could not find a way to get it to prompt through the browser to grant access again.

As the service account C:\Users\\Documents.credentials\calendar-dotnet-quickstart folder was being created just fine, I simply copied the Google.Apis.Auth.OAuth2.Responses.TokenResponse-user from the same folder in my dev environment and it now works fine.

That may not be the best or ultimate solution to this but it works.

I suspect if I logged in as that service user for the scheduled task and ran from the command prompt I would get prompted via the browser to grant the authorization.

Hope this helps someone.