Drive

Google Drive client.

Install

python -m pip install drive

With Poetry:

poetry add drive

You also need to have libmagic installed to get automatic detection of uploaded files’ MIME types. If you don’t have it, you must provide the original_mime_type keyword argument when you upload a file. On Linux, if you do have libmagic but Python can’t see it, see this StackOverflow question.

Requirement: Python 3.9 or higher.

Usage

The API exposes a client as drive.client.Client that manipulates instances of drive.files.File. A File represent a Google Drive file. Note that both regular files and directories are represented as Files, and a file can have multiple parent directories. You can check if a File is a directory using the is_directory attribute.

Note: "Folder" is just a synonym for "Directory".

Authentication

By default, the client reads your service account key JSON file at the location given by the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS. You can override this behavior by passing it directly:

client = Client("/path/to/your/service-account-key.json")

See Google’s documentation on how to create a service account key.

Client

High-level Client methods:

• get_file(file_id) (File)
• get_file_by_name(name) (File)
• files_shared_with_me() (File list)
• get_shared_directory(name) (File)
• root() (File)
• upload_file(parent, path[, name]): Upload a file
• upload_excel_workbook(parent, name, workbook): Upload an openpyxl workbook in a Google spreadsheet under parent with the name name.

The client also exposes low-level methods that work on file ids.

File

• id (str, attribute)
• name (str, attribute)
• is_directory (bool, attribute)
• human_type (str, attribute): Human-readable file type
• exists() (bool)
• unlink() (bool): Remove the file. If it's a directory, all its children are removed as well
• rename(new_name): Rename the file
• move_in(new_parent[, new_name]): Move a file under another directory. It can also rename the file at the same time.
• list(): List a directory’s content
• create_folder(name): Create a folder under the current one
• get_or_create_folder(name): Retrieve a child folder or create it if it doesn’t exist
• get_child(name): Return a file under the current directory.
• parents(): Return a file's parents
• parent(): Return the first parent of a file
• download_file(path[, mime_type]): Download the file at a given location
• download_workbook(): Download the file as an openpyxl workbook
• json(): Parse the file as JSON
• jsons(): Parse the file as JSONS (one JSON per line) and returns a generator

Methods that operate on directories (e.g. list()) generally have no effect if the File instance is a regular file.

Examples

from drive.client import Client

# Uses credentials from the path in the environment variable
# GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS.
cl = Client()

# Get the root directory
d = cl.root()
print(d.is_directory)  # True
print(d.name)  # e.g. "My Drive"

# Get a directory's content
for f in d.list():
    print(f.name)

# Get a shared directory
d = cl.get_shared_directory("My Shared Dir")

Spreadsheets

from drive.client import Client
from openpyxl import Workbook

cl = Client()

# Download
f = cl.get_file_by_name("my_sheet")
workbook = f.download_workbook()  # openpyxl workbook
# save your download:
workbook.save("myfile.xlsx")

# Upload
workbook = Workbook()
d = cl.get_shared_directory("My Shared Directory")
cl.upload_excel_workbook(d, "my_other_sheet", workbook)

Drawings

from drive.client import Client

cl = Client()
# download a Drawing in a png image
cl.download_file("11AASomeFileId", "localfile.png", "image/png")

License

Copyright © 2016-2025 Baptiste Fontaine

Distributed under the MIT License.