Google drive API and auth - authentication

I want to create a web app letting any user upload a file to my Google drive and then be able to view it through the browser.
So far looking at Google's examples it seems I have to auth to my Google Drive on the server side (makes sense....) but also end-users have to auth before uploading anything to my drive using Oauth. Is there a way to prevent having to ask users to authenticate prior to uploading documents given that I am authorized through my server to my Google Drive account?
Allowing anyone to view a document is more straightforward through the use of a public folder...

Related

Google Drive API: The user does not have sufficient permissions for this file using API Key

I'm trying to integrate Google Drive using the SDK with my app written in VB.Net using API Key and I'm following this tutorial https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/dotnet/get_started#simple
What happens is that when calling the ExecuteAsync method, I receive back an Exception saying that the user does not have sufficient permissions for this file.
Basically, I only have the API key (with restriction to access only Google Drive API) and I don't want to ask the user for permissions, because I'd like to use a specific account (so everyone would be sending files to that account).
I couldn't find a way to "link" this API Key to a specific account also.
I ended up using a service account for the Google Drive API.
The idea here was quite simple, where I created this account and downloaded a generated JSON file that is used by the SDK to Authenticate and call the API.
With this service account, I didn't use the API Key and I could leverage Permissions
and set permissions to each user on each created folder.

Download files from a specific user's drive with google drive api

Is there a way to download files from a specific google drive, by using the google drive api? Currently i can only read the drive of the google user logged in.
Inorder to access data owned by someone on Google drive you need their permission. You can't just access my files unless I let you. The most common method for this is oauth2 but you can also use a service account.
Now if I set a file to public you would be able to read it using an API key but I would have to give you the file id.

upload file to google drive without human interaction via SDK

I want to upload files to google drive. I'm using C# and have referred following links to get started
https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/web/quickstart/dotnet
https://developers.google.com/drive/v3/web/manage-uploads
I'm able to upload the file successfully to google drive but my main concern is I don't want to display any sort of UI/human interaction. It should be able to automatically upload the file.
Using OAuth2.0 there is a need that we have to manage and generate access/refresh token. I have no idea how these should be managed.
Isn't there any other way where the user can have access to google drive programmatically just by sharing his/her Gmail account username/password to achieve this?
Isn't there any other way where the user can have access to google drive programmatically just by sharing his/her Gmail account username/password to achieve this?
No there is not
The user needs to authorise your app one time. After that, you can save Refresh Token and use that for future unattended use.

Does 'google-drive' Web Component replaces the Google Drive Web APIs?

The google-apis together with google-drive makes it super easy to add Google drive app integration to websites. But it seems that it doesn't have many options other than uploading files using app to the user google drive account.
I want to allow users to upload large files to my own google drive storage, will google web components achieve such task or I will need to dive into Google Drive Web APIs server side scripting, using PHP as an example.
Will Google Web Components support more features in the future like allowing users to upload to app google storage (my own google drive) ?
Thank you.
Google Web Components not Polymer components. They are wrappers around Google API's like Drive. That said, I would pose this question in the context of the Drive API rather than in Polymer.

Allowing read and write access to Google Drive files to unauthenticated clients

We have been working on a web service (http://www.genomespace.org/) that allows computational biology tools that implement our REST API to, among other things, read and write files stored on "The Cloud".
Our default file storage is a common Amazon S3 bucket, but we now allow users to mount their own private S3 bucket as well as files on Dropbox.
We are now trying to enable similar functionality for Google Drive and have run into some problems unique to Google Drive that we have not encountered with S3 or Dropbox.
Only way to allow clients that are not Google-authenticated to read files unobtrusively is to make the files "Public". Our preference would be that once the user has authorized access to our application via OAuth2, the user files could remain "Private" in Google Drive.
However, even though the user has already authorized our web service to offline access to their "Private" files, we have not found a way to generate a URL that a client authorized by our system can use to GET the file directly without the client being logged into Google as well.
The closest we have come to this functionality has been to change the file permissions to "Anyone with Link", except that for files greater than 20MB Google insists on returning an intermediate web page warning that the file has not been scanned for viruses. In addition to having to mess with file permissions, this would break our existing clients. Only when the file is "Public" and we utilize URLs of the form https://googledrive.com/host/PARENT_FOLDER_ID/FILENAME can non-Google clients read the files without interference.
Have not found any way for clients that are not Google-authenticated to upload a file to Google Drive. Our API allows our authorized clients to PUT files directly to the backing file storage using URLs provided by our server. However, even if a folder is marked "Public", the client requires Google authentication credentials to save to Google Drive. We could deal with both of these issues with intermediate hops through our system (e.g., our web server would first download the file from Google Drive and then allow the client to GET it) however this would be woefully inefficient and, hopefully, unnecessary. These problems have been discussed multiple times before on stackoverflow (e.g. here and here and have read the responses very carefully, but have not seen any recent discussion.
The Google folks direct their API users to post on stackoverflow for support, so I am hoping for a fresh look from insiders.
The general answer is: dont make the drive requests through the user's browser. Insead do everything from your servers. You are the one having the (refresh) tokens for users, so you should make all requests like a proxy between the user and Drive. Same for downloading, you download it and return to the user. As long as you use each drive's token there shouldnt be rate limit/quota issues.