Complete the steps described in the rest of this page to create a simple Python command-line application that makes requests to the Gmail API.
Prerequisites
To run this quickstart, you'll need:
- Python 2.6 or greater
- The pip package management tool
- A Google account with Gmail enabled
Step 1: Turn on the Gmail API
Click this button to create a new Cloud Platform project and automatically enable the Gmail API:
In resulting dialog click DOWNLOAD CLIENT CONFIGURATION and save the file
credentials.json
to your working directory.
Step 2: Install the Google Client Library
Run the following command to install the library using pip:
pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client google-auth-httplib2 google-auth-oauthlib
See the library's installation page for the alternative installation options.
Step 3: Set up the sample
Create a file named quickstart.py
in your working directory and copy in the
following code:
Step 4: Run the sample
Run the sample using the following command:
python quickstart.py
The sample will attempt to open a new window or tab in your default browser. If this fails, copy the URL from the console and manually open it in your browser.
If you are not already logged into your Google account, you will be prompted to log in. If you are logged into multiple Google accounts, you will be asked to select one account to use for the authorization.
- Click the Accept button.
- The sample will proceed automatically, and you may close the window/tab.
Notes
- Authorization information is stored on the file system, so subsequent executions will not prompt for authorization.
- The authorization flow in this example is designed for a command-line application. For information on how to perform authorization in a web application, see Using OAuth 2.0 for Web Server Applications.
Further reading
- Google Developers Console help documentation
- Google APIs Client for Python documentation
- Gmail API PyDoc documentation
- Gmail API reference documentation
Troubleshooting
AttributeError: 'Module_six_moves_urllib_parse' object has no attribute 'urlparse'
This error can occur in Mac OSX where the default installation of the six
module (a dependency of this library) is loaded before the one that pip
installed. To fix the issue, add pip's install location to the PYTHONPATH
system environment variable:
Determine pip's install location with the following command:
pip show six | grep "Location:" | cut -d " " -f2
Add the following line to your
~/.bashrc
file, replacing<pip_install_path>
with the value determined above:export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:<pip_install_path>
Reload your
~/.bashrc
file in any open terminal windows using the following command:source ~/.bashrc
TypeError: sequence item 0: expected str instance, bytes found
This error is due to a bug in httplib2
, and upgrading to the latest version
should resolve it:
pip install --upgrade httplib2
Cannot uninstall 'six'. It is a distutils installed project...
When running the pip install
command you may receive the following error:
Cannot uninstall 'six'. It is a distutils installed project and thus we
cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to
only a partial uninstall.
This can happen on Mac OSX when pip attempts to upgrade the six
package that
came pre-installed. To work around this issue you can add the flag
--ignore-installed six
to the pip install
command listed in Step 2.