I’m building a web app where people can upload files from their computer directly to Google Drive and later download them back. I’m using Python for the backend. The problem I’m running into is that the Google Drive API seems to need the files to be saved on my server first before I can upload them to Google Drive. But I want users to be able to select files from their computer through a web form and have them go straight to Google Drive. What’s the proper way to handle file uploads in this situation? Do I need to temporarily store the files on my server or is there a way to stream them directly?
Use Google Drive’s resumable upload with the file stream straight from your form. I set MediaIoBaseUpload with resumable=True for user uploads. This processes files in chunks without storing everything locally. Your HTML form needs multipart/form-data encoding, then grab the file stream in Python and feed it to the Drive API. One thing I learned the hard way - handle upload interruptions properly because network issues will kill the stream. Resumable upload picks up where it stopped if you set it up right.
werkzeug’s FileStorage makes this super easy! just grab the file stream from the upload and send it directly to google’s api. no need to save it on disk first, which is great. it works for most file sizes. just be sure to set decent timeout values since streaming can be slow.
I hit this exact problem building a document management system last year. You don’t need permanent storage - just temporary handling. I used Flask’s request.files to grab uploads and streamed them straight to Google Drive without touching disk. Work with the file object in memory - read the content into a BytesIO object and feed it to Google Drive’s MediaIoBaseUpload method. Files stay in memory during upload, so your server stays clean. Watch out for large files though - keeping everything in memory can bite you. Stream the files instead of saving to filesystem first.