Quickstart: Run a Search Console App in Python

This sample web app prints the list of sites that you can access, and the sitemaps, if any, for each of those sites.

Requirements

To run this program, you'll need:

  • Access to the internet and a web browser, in order to authorize the sample app.
  • A Google account with at least one website verified in Google Search Console.
  • Python 3 and the flask web application framework.

Instructions

For this sample, you'll adapt the OAuth 2.0 for Web Server Applications sample application. This sample python app uses the flask web application framework to run a web-based application that manages OAuth keys and calls a Google Cloud API. You will adapt the linked sample to call the Search Console API and print out the results in a web page.

Follow the setup instructions on the OAuth sample page linked above, and copy the sample code, then modify the code as shown below. Specifically, follow the setup instructions for your coding environment, setting up (or reusing) a project that can access the Search Console API in the Google Cloud console, and generating credentials for a web application.

You will use the Complete code example for Python as the source code for this sample.

Read Modifications below to see what changes you need to make to the linked instructions.

If you need to access the Google API Python Client from a Google App Engine project, you'll need to use a service account to manage your permissions.

Modifications

When following the instructions on the linked Oauth2 sample page, make the following changes:

  1. Enable the Google Search Console API rather than the Drive API.

  2. Copy the sample application at the end of the OAUth document linked above, and replace this 

    SCOPES = ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.metadata.readonly']
API_SERVICE_NAME = 'drive'
API_VERSION = 'v2'
    With this: 
    SCOPES = ['https://www.googleapis.com/auth/webmasters.readonly']
API_SERVICE_NAME = 'searchconsole'
API_VERSION = 'v1'

  3. Replace the body of the Python language test_api_request() function with the following code: 

    @app.route('/test')
def test_api_request():
  if 'credentials' not in flask.session:
    return flask.redirect('authorize')

  # Load credentials from the session.
  credentials = google.oauth2.credentials.Credentials(
      **flask.session['credentials'])

  # Retrieve list of properties in account
  search_console_service = googleapiclient.discovery.build(
      API_SERVICE_NAME, API_VERSION, credentials=credentials)
  site_list = search_console_service.sites().list().execute()

  # Filter for verified URL-prefix websites.
  verified_sites_urls = [s['siteUrl'] for s in site_list['siteEntry']
                        if s['permissionLevel'] != 'siteUnverifiedUser'
                        and s['siteUrl'].startswith('http')]

  # Print the sitemaps for all websites that you can access.
  results = '<!DOCTYPE html><html><body><table><tr><th>Verified site</th><th>Sitemaps</th></tr>'
  for site_url in verified_sites_urls:

    # Retrieve list of sitemaps submitted
    sitemaps = search_console_service.sitemaps().list(siteUrl=site_url).execute()
    results += '<tr><td>%s</td>' % (site_url)

    # Add a row with the site and the list of sitemaps
    if 'sitemap' in sitemaps:
      sitemap_list = "<br />".join([s['path'] for s in sitemaps['sitemap']])
    else:
      sitemap_list = "<i>None</i>"
    results += '<td>%s</td></tr>' % (sitemap_list)

  results += '</table></body></html>'

  # Save credentials back to session in case access token was refreshed.
  # ACTION ITEM: In a production app, you likely want to save these
  #              credentials in a persistent database instead.
  flask.session['credentials'] = credentials_to_dict(credentials)

  return results

  4. In our testing, we needed to manually set OAUTHLIB_INSECURE_TRANSPORT to 1 in the Bash environment: export OAUTHLIB_INSECURE_TRANSPORT=1. If you get errors about HTTPS required to run the sample app, try setting that variable.