Drive files generator

Tool to generate folders and documents on Google Drive from a JSON file.

JSON file tree

The JSON file describes the file tree you want to create on Google Drive.

An example will help you understand the structure of it.

{
  "my-drive": {
    "docs": ["My Google Docs"],
    "sheets": 3,
    "folders": {
      "ZORRO": {
        "forms": 1,
        "sites": ["Google Site #1", "Google Site #2"],
        "folders": [{
          "slides": ["Awesome slides"]
        }, {
          "docs": 1
        }, {
          "folders": {
            "An empty folder": {}
          }
        }]  
      }
    }
  }
}

1. The outter object must have a single entry. The key is the ID of the folder where you want to create the file tree or the special value my-drive if you want it to be the root of your Drive. A shared drive ID can be passed too.

2. Inside a folder, you can specify the different Google Drive elements you want to create. Either documents from the the list, or the special keyword "folders" if you want to create subfolders.

3. A folder can be identified by its name (= JSON key, e.g. folder "ZORRO" in the example) or you can define the subfolders as a list and the script will find a name for them. Exception for the root element which has to be my-drive or an existing Google Drive folder ID (shared drives are supported).

4. To specify which Google Docs, Sheets, Sites (and so on) you want to create, you can either tell how many you want and they will have a timestamp for name ("docs": 3 will create 3 Google Docs - not possible for folders at the moment) or you can specify a list of names ("docs": ["one", "two", "three"]).

5. If you want to create an empty folder, just add an entry with an empty dict ("An empty folder": {})

Types of Google Drive files

Here are the types of files you can create. The left-hand side is what you put in your JSON file, the right-hand side is the corresponding mime type in Google Drive.

{
    "docs": "application/vnd.google-apps.document",
    "drawings": "application/vnd.google-apps.drawing",
    "forms": "application/vnd.google-apps.form",
    "slides": "application/vnd.google-apps.presentation",
    "scripts": "application/vnd.google-apps.script",
    "sites": "application/vnd.google-apps.site",
    "sheets": "application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet",
}

Credentials

At the moment, the script is not packaged nor published as an app. So you have to create your own GCP Oauth client ID for installed app (this procedure).
Download the JSON file and pass it to the command line.

You also have to activate the Drive API in your GCP project.

The script will ask for permission to write in Google Drive. After the scope authorization process is done, it will save your refresh token + access token into a file if (and only if) you have passed --store-creds with a file path to the command line. Otherwise it will ask your permission at each run.

Run the script

usage: drive_files_gen.py [-h] [--store-creds STORE_CREDS] client_id_file json_file

Generate Google Drive folders and documents from a JSON file.

positional arguments:
  client_id_file        the client id JSON file, downloaded from GCP
  json_file             the Drive file tree, in JSON format

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --store-creds STORE_CREDS
                        if you want to store your creds (refresh + access token) on your filesystem, give it a file path

Test the script

I've made a bit of unit testing with pytest. It requires to have both a JSON Oauth client file and a valid JSON credentials file (with the refresh token + access token). You will see in test_main.py that I reference a test_config package, which is where I store the path to JSON files.

To test it, simply run pytest