slackspread 0.0.2

Wrappers around gspread and slack API

Presentation

Available modules

WIP

Installation

pip3 install --upgrade slackspread

Prerequisites for a smooth authentication

Authentication to slack API

If using python sdk for slack API is new to you, head over here to get a nice introduction. When everyting is in place and you got your slack bot token from Slack, just 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")

Authentication to google spreads API

Gspread revolves on a json credentials file to authenticate on google spreads API. The init method of Gspread needs both the json file and a set of environment variables.

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": ""
}

Some of the fields in the credentials.json must be kept private, so we strongly advise to replace those fields with empty or non-explicit values, especially if you push the json credentials file to a git repo.

In any case, when initiating a Gspread object, several environment variables will be looked for to replace the sensitive fields from the json with the right values (stored as environment variables). Here is the list of fields that will be replaced within the json before trying to authenticate on the spread API

PROJECT_ID
PRIVATE_KEY_ID
PRIVATE_KEY
CLIENT_ID
CLIENT_EMAIL

Precisely, Gspread() takes three arguments :

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

The prefix allows to store environment variables for several spreadsheet API projects. 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

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.