Authenticate to Google Drive and download spreadsheet with Python urllib2 requests

Question

I want to download a document from my Google Drive that verifies my Google account (I only want certain users to be able to access it and do not want to publish it on the web). I've tried using requests, but it seems like I'm doing something incorrectly. By navigating to the URL https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/document key>/export?format=xls in a browser, I may download my document.

So in my python script :

import os
import requests
import shutil
from requests.auth import HTTPBasicAuth

remote = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/<document key>/export?format=xls"
username = os.environ['GOOGLEUSERNAME']
password = os.environ['GOOGLEPASSWORD']
r = requests.get(remote, auth=HTTPBasicAuth(username,password))
if r.status_code == 200:
  with open("document.xls","wb") as f:
    shutil.copyfileobj(r.raw, f)

However, the resulting document.xls is empty.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Your goal may be feasible, but the following reasons (which are by no means all of them) make it unlikely that it will be simple:

1. Google is usually blocking user-agents that are non-browsers(like your Python script) for browser-intended content (for security reasons); you would have to spoof it, which is actually easy
2. Multi-factor authentication - you would have to turn that off (easy, but you open yourself up for being hacked...)
3. Session-cookie - aka security cookie; (not so easy to get ahold of)

What you should do instead

Use the official google-drive API. Also, the Python client library has a nice tutorial and this page describes how to download files from google drive.

If you want to write even less code, then libraries like PyDrive will make you are living even easier.