slackspread 0.1.2

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 plus an optional :

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

environ_vars:

list of variables to populate from environment variables within the credentials file. If None, all of the above will be changed. If a list of zero length, none will be changed

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.