I’m working with the Google Drive Java API and I have a question about how authentication works. I know that the best practice is to create a Drive object once and reuse it across multiple threads in my application. But what happens if my application runs for a very long time without stopping? Will the authentication tokens expire at some point and force me to log in again? Or does the API automatically handle refreshing the credentials behind the scenes? I’m trying to understand if I need to worry about re-authentication in a daemon process that might run for weeks or months.
i’ve been running batch jobs that pull from google drive for months - auth usually works fine on its own, but i’d still store your refresh token securely and log auth events to catch any issues. haven’t had problems myself, but better safe than sorry.
Yeah, Google auth does expire, but their client library handles most of it automatically. I’ve been running a document sync service for over a year now - the auto-refresh works great, but you definitely want error handling around your Drive API calls. Refresh tokens can go invalid if users change passwords or revoke access from their Google account. I set up monitoring to catch auth failures and added a fallback to alert admins when we need manual re-auth. The service ran for months without issues, but that safety net saved me from silent failures when tokens eventually died.
Yes, the Google Drive API does handle token refresh automatically, but there are important considerations for long-running applications. Access tokens expire after one hour; however, the Java client library will typically refresh them using your stored refresh token without any additional effort from you. The main concern lies with the refresh token itself, as it can be revoked in certain situations such as account inactivity, password changes, or security issues. For applications that operate continuously over months, it’s wise to implement try-catch blocks around your API calls to gracefully manage authentication failures and have a contingency plan in place. In my experience with long-running services, the auto-refresh worked smoothly for weeks, but having robust error handling was crucial to prevent unexpected downtime due to potential token revocations.