Django Google Drive Storage¶

Django Google Drive Storage is a Django Storage implementation that uses Google Drive as a backend for storing data.

Please take note that with this implementation you could not save or load data from a user’s Drive. You can use only a Drive dedicated to a Google Project. This means that:

this storage interacts with Google Drive as a Google Project, not a Google User.
your project can use Google Drive only through Google Drive SDK. Because no user is associated with this Drive, you cannot use Google Drive User Interface.
this storage authenticates with Google using public private keys. See prerequisites for how to obtain it.

Having stated that, with this storage you gain a 15GB space hosted on Google Server where you are able to store data using Django models.

Prerequisites¶

To use this storage, you have to:

Installation¶

This storage is hosted on PyPI. It can be easily installed through pip:

pip install django-googledrive-storage

Setup¶

Once installed, there are a few steps to configure the storage:

add the module gdstorage to your installed apps in your settings.py file:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...,
    'django.contrib.staticfiles',
    'gdstorage'
)

create a section in your setting.py that contains the configuration for this storage:

#
# Google Drive Storage Settings
#

GOOGLE_DRIVE_STORAGE_JSON_KEY_FILE = '<path to your json private key file>'
GOOGLE_DRIVE_STORAGE_MEDIA_ROOT = '<base google drive path for file uploads>' # OPTIONAL

The GOOGLE_DRIVE_STORAGE_JSON_KEY_FILE must be the path to private json key file obtained by Google.
Alternatively, you can place the contents of your json private key file into an environment variable named GOOGLE_DRIVE_STORAGE_JSON_KEY_FILE_CONTENTS, this requires setting GOOGLE_DRIVE_STORAGE_JSON_KEY_FILE to None.

The GOOGLE_DRIVE_STORAGE_MEDIA_ROOT is analogous to MEDIA_ROOT for django’s built-in FileSystemStorage

instantiate the storage on you models.py file before using into the models:

from gdstorage.storage import GoogleDriveStorage

# Define Google Drive Storage
gd_storage = GoogleDriveStorage()

Use¶

Once configured, it can be used as storage space associated with Django:

class Map(models.Model):
    id = models.AutoField( primary_key=True)
    map_name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    map_data = models.FileField(upload_to='maps', storage=gd_storage)

Note

You can get the upload_to parameter to ignore GOOGLE_DRIVE_STORAGE_MEDIA_ROOT by using an absolute path e.g /maps

File permissions¶

Using the storage this way, all files will be saved as publicly available for read (which is the most common use case), but sometimes you could have different reason to use Google Storage.

It is possible to specify a set of file permissions 1 to change how the file could be read or written.

This code block will assign read only capabilities only to the user identified by foo@mailinator.com.

from gdstorage.storage import GoogleDriveStorage, GoogleDrivePermissionType, GoogleDrivePermissionRole, GoogleDriveFilePermission

permission =  GoogleDriveFilePermission(
   GoogleDrivePermissionRole.READER,
   GoogleDrivePermissionType.USER,
   "foo@mailinator.com"
)

gd_storage = GoogleDriveStorage(permissions=(permission, ))

class Map(models.Model):
    id = models.AutoField( primary_key=True)
    map_name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    map_data = models.FileField(upload_to='maps/', storage=gd_storage)

Source and License¶

Source can be found on GitHub with its included license.

Footnotes

1: A detailed explanation of Google Drive API permission can be found here.