How to use authenticate a user for google sheets api on a remote server using Node.js?

Question

I am working with Google sheets and node.js and I am able to authorize a user locally and get auth data using cmd using this tutorial https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/quickstart/nodejs but cant authorize it on a remote server like Heroku so I have found an example https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/sheets-api/#4 but can't really grasp how to implement it in this example https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/quickstart/nodejs .

Thanks in Advance!!

Answer 1

Depending on your requirements and architecture, it may make sense to write to the spreadsheet using a service account . Here is my code for doing that from NodeJS .

Advantages of service accounts:

• You don't have to do the OAuth dance (less code, fewer steps for the user).
• Your code can write to the spreadsheet even when no user has granted OAuth access.

Disadvantage:

• It's hard to enforce different access for different users, as all writes happen with whatever access you have granted to the service account.