I’m working on an automated testing solution and need to eliminate manual authentication steps. The goal is to have my script run without requiring user intervention for token management.
I want to download picture files from Google Drive through a service account setup in Node.js. This approach should bypass the need for interactive OAuth flows.
Could someone provide a detailed walkthrough for implementing this? I’m looking for guidance on setting up the service account credentials, configuring the Drive API connection, and handling the actual file download process.
Any code examples or documentation references would be really helpful for getting this working properly.
I built this exact setup for a production automation system last year. The biggest thing that got me was making sure the service account can actually access your files. You’ve got to either share the Drive folder directly with the service account email, or add it as a member if you’re using shared drives.
When you create the JWT credentials, double-check your scopes - you need ‘https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly’ at minimum. For downloads, grab the file metadata first, then use export or get depending on whether it’s a Google Workspace file or regular upload.
One heads up - large files can blow up your memory. I’d stream anything over a few MB.
yep, googleapis is the way to go! just make sure u set up your service account right, it needs permissions to access files in Drive. don’t forget to enable the Drive API in ur Google Cloud console or you’ll hit those pesky 403 errors!
Hit this exact issue building a document processing pipeline at work. Spent days fighting with authentication before realizing the key file path was breaking everything. Use an absolute path for your service account JSON - relative paths will bite you during deployment. For downloads, don’t forget the alt=media parameter or you’ll get metadata instead of the actual file. Test your auth by listing files first before trying downloads. And definitely add error handling for timeouts and rate limits - learned that one the hard way when my automation kept crashing.