I want to build integration between Google Drive and my cloud platform. My goal is to let users move their Drive files straight to my service without downloading them first.
Right now the only way I can think of is downloading files to local storage and then uploading them again. This works fine on desktop computers but mobile devices like phones and tablets make this really difficult. Some mobile platforms don’t even let you access the file system properly.
Is there a way to use Google Drive API to send files directly from Drive to my external service? I need users to give permission for this transfer but I want it to happen server to server without going through their device.
Any suggestions would be helpful.
yeah this is totally doable with drive api. i did this for a backup service last month and it works great. basically you setup oauth to get user permissions then use your server to grab files from drive and push them straight to your platform. no temp storage needed, just stream the data through your backend. works much better than the download/upload method especially for larger files.
You can definitely accomplish this using Google Drive’s export functionality combined with direct API calls. The approach involves making authenticated requests to Google Drive API endpoints that return file content directly as HTTP responses, which you can then forward to your cloud service’s upload API without intermediate storage. For Google Workspace files like Docs or Sheets, you’ll need to use the export endpoints with specific MIME types since these don’t exist as traditional files. Regular files can be accessed through the files.get endpoint with media alt parameter. The tricky part is handling large files efficiently - you’ll want to implement chunked transfers to avoid memory issues on your server. I’ve built similar integrations and found that using streaming HTTP libraries works best for maintaining low memory footprint. Make sure your server can handle the bandwidth requirements since all data flows through your infrastructure even though users don’t download locally.
Google Drive API supports direct file streaming which is exactly what you need for this scenario. Instead of downloading files locally, you can fetch the file content as a stream using the Drive API and pipe it directly to your cloud service’s upload endpoint. This approach eliminates the need for local storage entirely. The key is using the alt=media parameter when making the API call to get file content. This returns the raw file data rather than metadata. You can then stream this data directly to your service’s API without storing it anywhere temporarily. I implemented something similar last year and it worked perfectly for files up to several GB in size. For authentication, you’ll need to implement OAuth2 flow to get user consent, then use the refresh token on your server to make the transfer calls. The entire process happens server-side once the user authorizes the connection.