googleauth

Create and refresh a Google OAuth 2.0 authentication token for command-line apps


This module is based on ghauth which does the same thing for GitHub tokens

You can learn about Google tokens here https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/OAuth2WebServer

To use this you will need to:

- have a google account
- create a new application at the google developers console
- enable an API on your new application (e.g. the gmail API)
- create a new client ID for an "Installed application"
- store the client ID and client secret in a secure location (you will need them to use googleauth)
- for the API you want to access locate the scope URL. e.g. gmail's scope url for read-only is: https://www.googleapis.com/auth/gmail.readonly

Example usage

``
$ npm install googleauth -g
$ googleauth --scope="https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive" --client_id="foobar" --client_secret="mysecret"
Open the following URL in your browser, then paste the resulting authorization code below:

https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?scope=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive&redirect_uri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob&response_type=code&client_id=foobar

Google Authorization Code: weeeeeeeeee
{ access_token: 'foo', token_type: 'Bearer', expires_in: 3600, refresh_token: 'bar' }
`

Because the refresh token is persisted, the next time you run it there will be no prompts, and a fresh google token will be requested from google every time:

`
$ googleauth
{ access_token: 'freshtokenhere', token_type: 'Bearer', expires_in: 3600, refresh_token: 'bar' }
`

Resetting your token

A JSON file will be created when you first get a token at this location:

`js
path.join(process.env.HOME || process.env.USERPROFILE, '.config', 'googleauth.json')
`

You can simply delete that file to make googleauth forget about you.

If you change token settings e.g. add/remove scopes you will have to delete this file first so that googleauth will prompt you for the authentication flow again.

Options

Pass in args using this CLI syntax: googleauth --foo=bar. You can pass in multiple scope arguments.

- client_id (required)
- client_secret (required)
- scope (required) - authentication scope, googles are usually full URIs
- redirect_uri (default urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob) - you shouldnt need to change this, the default is what makes google use the CLI login flow
- config_path (default ~/.config/googleauth.json`)

Options are only required for authentication. You don't need to pass them in to refresh a token.