R/googlesheets4 non-interactive session

Question

When I use googlesheets4 in R, I use sheets_auth() in the console and it works fine. But when I try to run it in R markdown, and when I try to knit, I cannot seem to get the credentials. Can someone walk me through the process? I've gone to the vignettes for googlesheets4 but cannot seem to understand it.

Answer 1

This is working for me

gs4_auth(path = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.json")

It doesn't return anything, but after that I'm able to write data in my sheet with sheet_write()

To get the credentials in a json file you have to follow these steps:

• From the Developers Console, in the target GCP Project, go to IAM & Admin > Service accounts.
• Give it a decent name and description.
• For example, the service account used to create the googledrive docs has name “googledrive-docs” and description “Used when generating googledrive documentation”.
• Service account permissions. Whether you need to do anything here depends on the API(s) you are targetting. You can also modify roles later and iteratively sort this out.
• For example, the service account used to create the googledrive docs does not have any explicit roles.
• The service account used to test bigrquery has roles BigQuery Admin and Storage Admin.
• Grant users access to this service account? So far, I have not done this, so feel free to do nothing here. Or if you know this is useful to you, then by all means do so.
• Do Create key and download as JSON. This file is what we mean when we talk about a “service account token” in the documentation of gargle and packages that use gargle. gargle::credentials_service_account() expects the path to this file.
• Appreciate that this JSON file holds sensitive information. Treat it like a username & password combo! This file holds credentials that potentially have a lot of power and that don’t expire.
• Consider storing this file in such a way that it will be automatically discovered by the Application Default Credentials search strategy. See credentials_app_default() for details.
• You will notice the downloaded JSON file has an awful name, so sometimes I create a symlink that uses the service account’s name, to make it easier to tell what this file is.
• Remember to grant this service account the necessary permissions on any resources you plan to access, e.g., read or write permission on a specific Google Sheet. The service account has no formal relationship to you as a Google user and won’t automatically inherit permissions.

(copied from here https://gargle.r-lib.org/articles/get-api-credentials.html#service-account-token)