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googleapis/google-api-python-client

★ 8,819PythonAudience · developerComplexity · 3/5Setup · moderate

TLDR

This is Google's official Python library for connecting to hundreds of Google services like Drive, Gmail, and Calendar from Python code, handling all the low-level HTTP request plumbing automatically.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((google-api-python-client))
    What it does
      Connects to Google APIs
      Handles HTTP plumbing
      Maintenance mode
    Supported Services
      Drive Gmail
      Calendar YouTube
      Hundreds more
    Tech Stack
      Python 3.7 plus
      pip install
      Bundled API descriptions
    Audience
      Python developers
      Automation builders
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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Pull data from Google Sheets, Drive, or Gmail into a Python script without writing raw HTTP requests.

USE CASE 2

Automate Google Calendar event creation or YouTube video uploads from a Python application.

USE CASE 3

Connect to any of hundreds of Google services with one standardized library instead of separate per-service SDKs.

Tech stack

Python

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires setting up Google API credentials (OAuth2 or service account) in the Google Cloud Console before making any API calls.

In plain English

This is the official Python library for connecting to Google's APIs from Python code. It acts as a bridge between your Python program and hundreds of Google services, handling the low-level details of making requests and processing responses so you do not have to write that plumbing yourself. The library is considered complete and is now in maintenance mode. The team behind it will fix critical bugs and security problems but will not add new features. For new projects, Google's own maintainers recommend using the Cloud Client Libraries for Python instead, which is a separate set of more focused libraries, one per Google service. The reason for that recommendation is mainly that this library bundles descriptions of every Google API it supports, which makes the package over 50 MB in size. The focused libraries are smaller and tend to have more features for specific services. Version 2 of this library made a significant change: it no longer fetches API descriptions from the internet at runtime. Those descriptions are now bundled into the package itself, which makes startup more reliable but also contributes to the large package size. Upgrading from version 1 to version 2 is recommended for anyone still using the older version. Installation is straightforward via pip, and the README includes step-by-step instructions for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Python 3.7 and newer is required. Python 2.7 is only supported in the older version 1 branch. If your use case involves Google Ads or Firebase, the README points to dedicated libraries for those services rather than this general-purpose one.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me Python code using google-api-python-client to list all files in a specific Google Drive folder.
Prompt 2
How do I authenticate with google-api-python-client using a service account JSON file instead of interactive OAuth?
Prompt 3
Write a Python script using google-api-python-client to read all messages in a Gmail inbox label and print their subjects.
Prompt 4
How do I install google-api-python-client and make my first API call to the Google Calendar API to list upcoming events?
Prompt 5
I'm migrating from google-api-python-client v1 to v2. What changed about how API descriptions are loaded and what do I need to update in my code?
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