Python wrappers for google spread and slack¶
Introduction¶
This package contains two classes that are basic wrappers around slack and google spread APIs meant to be used to build more complex programs (including slack bots) upon them. Installing is simply made using pip:
pip3 install --upgrade slackspread
Only installation will be covered here, head over to the specific documentation about the slack bot here and the google spreadsheet wrapper here.
Connect to slack API with SlackBot()
¶
If using the slack API with python is new to you, head over here
to get a nice introduction. When everything is in place and you’ve got a slack bot
token from Slack, store it as an environment variable (MYBOT_TOKEN
in
the below exemple) and initiate the slack web client on python by giving the
variable’s name as argument.
from slackbot import SlackBot
mybot = SlackBot(token = "MYBOT_TOKEN")
Connect to google spread API with Gspread()
¶
Gspread
revolves on a json credentials file to authenticate on google
spreadsheets API. The init
method of Gspread
needs both a credentials
json file and a set of environment variables to replace sensitive values on
the json credentials file.
Details on have to obtain that file can be found here. This file would generally have the following form
{
"type": "service_account",
"project_id": "#project id",
"private_key_id": "#private key id",
"private_key": "#private key",
"client_email": "#client email",
"client_id": "#client id",
"auth_uri": "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth",
"token_uri": "https://oauth2.googleapis.com/token",
"auth_provider_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/certs",
"client_x509_cert_url": "client certification url"
}
Some of the fields in the credentials.json
must be kept private (in the above
example, the ones preceded with #
), so we strongly
advise to replace those fields with empty or non-explicit values in the json file,
especially if you’re to push it to git repository, and use environment variables
to store those fields instead. The Gspread
object will look for environment
the following variables at initialisation:
PROJECT_ID
PRIVATE_KEY_ID
PRIVATE_KEY
CLIENT_ID
CLIENT_EMAIL
CLIENT_X509_CERT_URL
More precisely, Gspread()
takes three arguments :
name: | name of spreadsheet to connect to |
---|---|
environ_prefix: | prefix for above listed environment variables |
credentials: | path to json file containing credentials with false sensitive fields |
The prefix is combined to the above-listed variables names to build the environment
variables names that the class will look for. The init
method will
replace the corresponding fields in the credentials.json
dictionary with the
values read from those variables.
Say your project’s name is something like my daily budget
. You
would first store the following environment variables
BUDGET_PROJECT_ID
BUDGET_PRIVATE_KEY_ID
BUDGET_PRIVATE_KEY
BUDGET_CLIENT_ID
BUDGET_CLIENT_EMAIL
BUDGET_CLIENT_X509_CERT_URL
And store somewhere a credentials.json
, let’s say at
~/.gscredits/budget-credentials.json
(on which you would have
replaced the sensitive fields with non-explicit or wrong values). All you need
to do is call Gspread
with the following syntax :
from easyspread import Gspread
budget_spread = Gspread(
name = 'my daily budget',
environ_prefix = 'BUDGET',
credentials = "~/.gscredits/budget-credentials.json"
)
Using environment variables makes it possible to have your code working while being safe on a network server, since the json file is stored without any sensitive data in it and the sensitive values are protected as environment variables.
Note that you can use the same credits for different spreadsheets. Each set of credits corresponds to a single project on google cloud, but can connect to any spreadsheet, provided it was authorized to in the spreadsheet’s parameters.