PHP Quickstart

Complete the steps described in the rest of this page, and in about five minutes you'll have a simple PHP command-line application that makes requests to the Google Sheets API.

Prerequisites

To run this quickstart, you'll need:

PHP 5.4 or greater with the command-line interface (CLI) and JSON extension installed.
The Composer dependency management tool.
A Google account.

Step 1: Turn on the Google Sheets API

Click this button to create a new console project and automatically enable the Google Sheets API:

Enable the Google Sheets API

This opens a new dialog. In the dialog, do the following:

Select + Create a new project.
Download the configuration file.
Move the downloaded file to your working directory and ensure it is named credentials.json.

Step 2: Install the Google Client Library

composer require google/apiclient:^2.0

See the library's installation page for the alternative installation options.

Step 3: Set up the sample

Create a file named quickstart.php in your working directory and copy in the following code:

sheets/quickstart/quickstart.php

View on GitHub

<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

if (php_sapi_name() != 'cli') {
    throw new Exception('This application must be run on the command line.');
}

/**
 * Returns an authorized API client.
 * @return Google_Client the authorized client object
 */
function getClient()
{
    $client = new Google_Client();
    $client->setApplicationName('Google Sheets API PHP Quickstart');
    $client->setScopes(Google_Service_Sheets::SPREADSHEETS_READONLY);
    $client->setAuthConfig('credentials.json');
    $client->setAccessType('offline');
    $client->setPrompt('select_account consent');

    // Load previously authorized token from a file, if it exists.
    $tokenPath = 'token.json';
    if (file_exists($tokenPath)) {
        $accessToken = json_decode(file_get_contents($tokenPath), true);
        $client->setAccessToken($accessToken);
    }

    // If there is no previous token or it's expired.
    if ($client->isAccessTokenExpired()) {
        // Refresh the token if possible, else fetch a new one.
        if ($client->getRefreshToken()) {
            $client->fetchAccessTokenWithRefreshToken($client->getRefreshToken());
        } else {
            // Request authorization from the user.
            $authUrl = $client->createAuthUrl();
            printf("Open the following link in your browser:\n%s\n", $authUrl);
            print 'Enter verification code: ';
            $authCode = trim(fgets(STDIN));

            // Exchange authorization code for an access token.
            $accessToken = $client->fetchAccessTokenWithAuthCode($authCode);
            $client->setAccessToken($accessToken);

            // Check to see if there was an error.
            if (array_key_exists('error', $accessToken)) {
                throw new Exception(join(', ', $accessToken));
            }
        }
        // Save the token to a file.
        if (!file_exists(dirname($tokenPath))) {
            mkdir(dirname($tokenPath), 0700, true);
        }
        file_put_contents($tokenPath, json_encode($client->getAccessToken()));
    }
    return $client;
}


// Get the API client and construct the service object.
$client = getClient();
$service = new Google_Service_Sheets($client);

// Prints the names and majors of students in a sample spreadsheet:
// https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BxiMVs0XRA5nFMdKvBdBZjgmUUqptlbs74OgvE2upms/edit
$spreadsheetId = '1BxiMVs0XRA5nFMdKvBdBZjgmUUqptlbs74OgvE2upms';
$range = 'Class Data!A2:E';
$response = $service->spreadsheets_values->get($spreadsheetId, $range);
$values = $response->getValues();

if (empty($values)) {
    print "No data found.\n";
} else {
    print "Name, Major:\n";
    foreach ($values as $row) {
        // Print columns A and E, which correspond to indices 0 and 4.
        printf("%s, %s\n", $row[0], $row[4]);
    }
}

Step 4: Run the sample

Run the sample using the following command:

php quickstart.php

The first time you run the sample, it will prompt you to authorize access:

Browse to the provided URL in your web 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.
Copy the code you're given, paste it into the command-line prompt, and press Enter.

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.

Troubleshooting

SSL certificate problem: unable to get local issuer certificate

This error indicates that the underlying HTTP libraries can't find a certificate store, and are therefore unable to setup the SSL connection to Google's servers. See the Guzzle library's documentation for information on how to setup a certificate store on your machine.