How to prevent fastai fastbook from requesting access to Google Drive when running in Google Colab? - google-colaboratory

Question

When setting up Fastbook in Google Colab, it requests permissions in order to access my Google Drive. This is the prompt I get:
Permit this notebook to access your Google Drive files?
This notebook is requesting access to your Google Drive files. Granting access to Google Drive will permit code executed in the notebook to modify files in your Google Drive. Make sure to review notebook code prior to allowing this access.
[No thanks] [Connect to Google Drive]
Since I'm running foreing (and potentially unsafe) code on my Google account, I don't feel comfortable granting permissions to Google Drive.
It looks the call asking for permission is: fastbook.setup_book()
How can I prevent fastbook from fastai from requesting access to Google Drive? If I don't grant the permission the following error occurrs and I'm unsure on whether it has been initialized or not:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
MessageError Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-8-fce0e354ba4c> in <module>
----> 1 fastbook.setup_book()
5 frames
/usr/local/lib/python3.7/dist-packages/google/colab/_message.py in read_reply_from_input(message_id, timeout_sec)
100 reply.get('colab_msg_id') == message_id):
101 if 'error' in reply:
--> 102 raise MessageError(reply['error'])
103 return reply.get('data', None)
104
MessageError: Error: credential propagation was unsuccessful

Answer 1

After looking at fastbook module source code and initialization, I found three ways on preventing fastai fastbook from asking Google Drive permissions when running in Google Colaboratory. As of this writing, all three work, you can use any of the three approaches safely.
1. Create /content/gdrive/My Drive directory
setup_colab function found in fastbook/__init__.py checks whether google drive has been mounted already. If you make it believe it has, it won't try to mount it again.
To do so, just add these two lines at the beginning of your notebook:
import os
os.makedirs ('/content/gdrive/My Drive', exist_ok = True)
Then run it, then you can run the import fastbook and its setup without any errors.
2. Do not execute fastbook.setup_book() (or comment that line)
It turns setup_book code only checks if it is running inside colab and if so, it mounts your google drive into this folder: /content/gdrive/ and creates the global variable "gdrive" which points to /content/gdrive/My Drive as a convenience way to save stuff there and have persistence.
As of this writing, it will be totally fine if you don't execute fastbook.setup_book(), or comment out that line; the rest of the notebook will run just fine. Again, the only thing that "setup" does, is to call "setup_colab()" in order to setup your Google Drive for the notebooks to be able to have some persistency (that might not be used on some notebooks anyway).
You can just change the initialization to:
! [ -e /content ] && pip install -Uqq fastbook
import fastbook
# fastbook.setup_book()
3. try/except fastbook.setup_book()
If you embed this call into a try/except, it won't return that error. This is what initialization will look like:
! [ -e /content ] && pip install -Uqq fastbook
import fastbook
try:
fastbook.setup_book()
except:
pass
Final thoughts
As of this writing (2022) the function setup_book only initializes google drive in colab, but this might change in the future (e.g in order to initialize other stuff). Probably the best solution would be to just use the first approach I described and create the folder so fastbook believes it has already mounted it, so if the setup_book call changes in the future to include other sort of initialization, we won't be preventing it from happening.
Regardless, it is always good to check out the source code and see what is going on under the hood.
As far as I've seen in the code, there should be no harm in granting permissions, since the only thing it does is to mount Google Drive in order to allow notebooks to save data permanently, so you have that data available across executions. However, a word of caution, since that does not mean that another library imported from any of those scripts could potentially exploit the fact that the permissions have already been granted and copy your private documents or other stuff somewhere else, or even ransom your documents. I'm guessing that if something like that would happen it will likely be picked up and addressed very quickly by the fast.ai community; TBH I might be a little bit "paranoid" with this stuff and it might be totally fine to just grant permissions, but just in case I prefer to err on the safe/paraonoid side.
Another alternative would be to just create another Google Account with an empty drive and run the notebooks from there without any fear of granting permissions.