I'm creating a web app for my company that will keep a number of files in sync with the files on Box. This will be done by using a cron job running every hour.
I have the application working by setting the developer token in my account, this was done for testing whilst I was building the application.
Now this is working I want to get the authentication working so I can just leaving this running. So I'm trying to work out if there is a way I can have an API key for our enterprise account or if I will have to implement OAuth and connect one user to the application, which seems to be a bit overkill?
You should probably use one of the SDKs, which take care of refreshing the tokens for you.
Essentially what you'll need is a keystore to store the tokens. You could store the Refresh-token only. When your cron wakes up, use the refresh token to get a new access-token and refresh-token. Store the new refresh token in your keystore. Then make your API calls using the Access-token, and then go back to sleep.
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I'm a hobbyist student developer playing around with the Actions on Google to create a simple "text adventure" game on Google Home. Since Google Home will be speaking to the player rather than the player reading the text, I'm hoping this will create an experience similar to the "Dungeons and Dragons" roleplaying game, with the computer working as the "Dungeon Master." With the natural language assistance offered by API.AI and Actions on Google, it seemed like a good fit, since the player can respond "naturally." Here's an example of an Amazon Alexa skill that does essentially what I'm going for.
However, every time I boot up the game, it's always a new game. I'd like to store a savegame with the user's previous state in a JSON file hosted on the user's Google Drive -- Since I'm just a student doing this for fun, I don't actually have an official website or anything beyond a free Heroku server I'm running the app from, making storing saves on my end pretty much out of the question.
I've walked through the Google Drive REST quickstart for Node.js, and I've gotten that working in the console just fine. The only problem is in that quickstart, the user has to click a link to authorize the application to read the stuff in their Google Drive account, and I'm not sure how I'd be able to "click a link" and give back an access token via voice on Google Home.
Is there a way to do this via Google Drive? Or is there a better way to provide persistent data between sessions? I don't normally work in web development, so any help would be appreciated.
The bad news is you won't be able to get away from the need for a user to use his web browser to authorise your app to access his Drive.
The good news is that you only need to do this once. When your app requests authoirsation, it should specify "offline", which will result in you being given a refresh token. You should save this somewhere in your database of users. Whenever you need to access the user's Drive, you can use the saved refresh token to request an access token and you're good to go.
You have a few problems that you need to solve here, and while they seem related, they're not as related as you might hope:
You need to get authorization to access a user's Drive space
You need to authenticate the user's Home (so you know this person has come back)
You have to connect the two relationships - so you know what Drive space to use for the Home device that is talking to you
You've found the answers to (1) already, and as noted, you'll need to use a browser for them to authorize you to access their Drive. You'll then store the refresh token and will be able to access it in the future.
But that is only part of the problem. Home does not provide you access to the user's Google account directly, so you'll have to manage your own account mechanism and tie it to Home. There are a few solutions here:
Home provides anonymous user identity in the JSON sent to your webhook. You can access this using getUser().user_id if you're using the Actions API library, or access this in the data.user.user_id field in the JSON. While this is similar to a browser cookie, it only stores the user ID and can't store additional data. There is also no concept of "local storage". On the plus side, this ID is consistent across devices.
You can request user information such as their name and address. But it doesn't have anything unique or account information, so this probably isn't useful to you.
You can implement an OAuth2 server and do account linking. Note that this is the other side from what you need to do with Google Drive - you'll be providing the access and refresh tokens to authenticate and authorize access to your account and the Google Home device will send these tokens back to you so you can determine who the user is. You don't actually need to store account information - you can provide token information using JSON Web Tokens (JWT) or other methods and have them store account information in a secure way. Users will use the Google Home app to actually sign-in to your service as a one-time event.
In order to handle (3), you may be thinking that (1) lets you get tokens and the OAuth solution for (2) requires you to hand out tokens. Can the two be combined? Well... probably, but it isn't as straightforward. You can't just give the Google OAuth2 endpoints to Home - they explicitly block that and you need to control your OAuth2 endpoints. You may, however, be able to build proxy endpoints - but I haven't explored the security implications of doing so.
I think you're on the right track - using Drive is a good place to store users' information. Using Home's account linking gives you a place where they have to come to your web site to authenticate and authorize their Home, and you can use this to do the same for their Drive.
We used to have an application connector implementing the Document List Service v3 to upload documents to users account. Now that the service will be discontinued starting as of next Monday and we need to migrate to the Drive API/SDK we have the problem to migrate our current login schema .. we are unable to use the OAuth 2 protocol and we need to authenticate users with their username/password credentials.
DocumentsService myService = new DocumentsService("xxx");
myService.setUserCredentials(username, password);
The reason is that our application scans and processes documents asynchronously from MFD devices (printers) and all processing/storage job is done in a different moment on processing servers, thus the limitation that the processing service cannot ask any consens to the user.
We do the same for other online cloud storage application (e.g. Dropbox) where they allow special 'OAuth 1' schema on request for such 'enterprise' situations.
How can we do this with the new Drive API/SDK? I couldn't find anything about that in the documentation rather than the service account, also looks like not suitable.
What you need to do is request authentication from you user once. The server gives you back a refresh token. Your automated application can then use this refresh token to get a new access token. You only need to ask the user one time for authentication. Then everything can run automated.
A service account wont really work in this instance because its meant for use with an account that you the developer own not a users account
I am trying to make a simple integration to BOX where I only access my own account. Since this is a server-side access, (the server-process calls the Box-api), having the Oauth 2.0 redirecting is a problem.
Is there a way I could acquire a token (even manually) and use it in my code, by-passing the hassle of Oauth 2.0 and the redirection ? Or may be some other way for this kind of scenario ?
Right now you can do this with a Developer Token, but that only lasts for 1 hour.
You can also do the auth on your laptop, then put the Refresh tokens into your server in a config file, much like you might do for a database-password file (hopefully only readable by the service-account on the machine that has access to run your script).
Then build your script to take the refresh-token, go get a token pair with it, and write the new refresh token into the config file.
I have a general comprehension question about OAuth access token retrieval for a Google Chrome Extension.
I have a popup HTML window in the browser that uses Jquery to request data from the server (a LAMP stack on AWS). The data is presented by PHP scripts which access a MySQL database. All very basic stuff.
I now want to implement a push messaging system using Google Cloud Messaging to alert users of new content that they can check. However I don't really understand where I should request the access token and how to listen for the response. I figure it should be in the PHP scripts but all the Google documentation that I've read states the user has to be present in order to allow access to push messaging. That tells me I should put it in the JavaScript but I feel this is a bad idea because every user could potentially request an access token when I think I only need one every 3000 seconds or so. If my app was completely implemented in PHP I'm sure this would be possible and now I'm worried that splitting it up like this leaves push messaging out of the question. Am I missing a crucial detail or just out of luck?
If the data access you need isn't user-specific, then you're right, there's no good reason to get a separate token for each user. Check out https://developers.google.com/accounts/cookbook/roles/Apps which discusses some options.
I'm in the middle of developing an application that integrates Box with an identity management environment for the purposes of SSO and user lifecycle management. Basically, our users use SAML to sign into their Box accounts, and then the status of their Box accounts is managed based on the status of their corporate accounts - if we terminate a user, the user's Box account needs to get disabled. This is one of many use cases that were in progress before the OAuth2 change.
Prior to the OAuth2 change, I was able to authenticate my enterprise admin account with the api_key and auth_token. This worked very well.
Now, with OAuth2, I'm not sure how to proceed. There is no UI for this at all, and I have no place to handle a redirect for the authorization token. Moreover, this is a nightly process that runs using the enterprise admin account, so I would have to get a new refresh token and bearer token every time this runs.
This doesn't make a lot of sense for my use case. Is there an alternative?
I am busy writing the same code with the same frustration as you have. However the refresh token does live for 14 days and what I plan to do is store the returned values encrypted in the registry. Each run my first action is to refresh the bearer key.
There however is no current timeline on the phasing out of the V1 Auth method and since some of the Enterprise stuff is yet to be ported to API V2 I suspect that if enough Enterprises push the BOX API team for a solution on this I am sure they will listen.
If I am honest I prefer the OAuth2 solution as it stops the key to your whole Enterprise data been sent in clear text across the internet as a URL param in API V1 and if someone did manage to break the SSL then only get a access token that is worth 60 mins max.
Not sure what language your writing the routines in but I am working with the API V2 SDK written by John Hoerr on GitHub and apart from a few little issues that he has fixed straight away from a .Net perspective it makes hitting the API a much more pleasant experience with all the de\serialisation handled by the SDK.