How to authenticate users of Shiny apps on shinyapps.io for Google Sheets (googlesheets)

Question

I have a Shiny app making use of the googlesheets package which requires the user to authenticate for writing to Google Sheets (despite the Sheet being public and "published to the web"). This is done graphically in a browser, and works when the Shiny app is run locally. However, when deployed on shinyapps.io, the authentication call crashes the app and logs an error:

Warning: Error in : oauth_listener() needs an interactive environment.

So, what options are there? I'm thinking it would be a bad idea to upload my own .httr-oauth file or token to shinyapps.io... Any workarounds?

Answer 1

In case anyone else has a problem with this, the new {googlesheets4} provides a solution:

https://googlesheets4.tidyverse.org/articles/articles/auth.html

If you don’t need to access private Sheets, use gs4_deauth() to indicate there is no need for a token. This puts googlesheets4 into a de-authorized mode.

(an example script is also included)