Get file from GoogleDrive without downloading it to storage - Python

Question

I have a python-script running on a server and I need to get a json-file from my GoogleDrive. I want to use the GoogleDrive API to get the file, which I know the name, location and ID of but I only could find code-samples which downloads the file to storage. The json-content is supposed to be a dict in my script and the file must not be downloaded to storage. I'm new to Python and the GoogleDrive API, so I don't know how to manage it by myself. This is the website I followed: https://www.thepythoncode.com/article/using-google-drive--api-in-python

I hope you can help me because I really need it. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I believe your goal as follows.

• You want to directly download the file to the memory without creating the data as a file using python.
  • From I need to get a json-file from my GoogleDrive., the file you want to download is the file except for Google Docs files (Spreadsheet, Document, Slides and so on). In this case, it's a text file.
• You have already been able to use Drive API with googleapis for python.
• You are using the script for authorizing from https://www.thepythoncode.com/article/using-google-drive--api-in-python.

In this case, in order to retrieve the file content to the memory, I would like to propose to retrieve it using requests. For this, the access token is retrieved from creds of get_gdrive_service().

In order to retrieve the file content, the method of "Files: get" is used by adding the query parameter of alt=media.

Sample script:

file_id = "###"  # Please set the file ID you want to download.

access_token = creds.token
url = "https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files/" + file_id + "?alt=media"
res = requests.get(url, headers={"Authorization": "Bearer " + access_token})
obj = json.loads(res.text)
print(obj)

• At above script, creds of creds.token is from get_gdrive_service().
• From your question, I thought that the file you want to download is the JSON data. So at above script, the downloaded data is parsed as JSON object.
• In this case, please import json and requests.

Note:

• When the returned content is JSON data, I think that you can also use res.json() instead of res.text. But when JSONDecodeError occurs, please check the value of res.text.

Reference:

• Download files