Connect to googlesheets via shiny in R with googlesheets4

Question

I'm trying to use an updated version of this example to connect to a private googlesheet via shiny, and deploy this app on the shinyapps.io server. The user is not required to authenticate to a google account as the app uses a specified pre-existing googlesheet.

I've followed this example (partly copied here), attempting to save the token to my shiny app:

# previous googlesheets package version:
shiny_token <- gs_auth() # authenticate w/ your desired Google identity here
saveRDS(shiny_token, "shiny_app_token.rds")

but tried to update it to googlesheets4, like this:

ss <- gs4_get("MY GOOGLE DOC URL") # do the authentication once, manually.
ss
gs4_has_token() # check that the token exists

# get token
ss_token <- gs4_token()
# save the token
save(ss_token, file = "APP PATH ... /data/tk.rdata")

Then in the app, I have placed this code outside the shinyApp() function.

load("data/tk.rdata")

googlesheets4::gs4_auth(token = ss_token, use_oob = T)

In the app, I connect to a google doc from the app, using a hardcoded id obtained from ss$spreadsheet_id above. The app works locally.

After attempting to deploy the app to the server I get the error "...Can't get google credentials. Are you running googlesheets4 in a non-interactive session?... etc" I thought that the token would contain sufficient information for this.

I'd be grateful if anyone can point me to a guide to setting this up, and also comment on whether this approach (saving a token on the shinyapps.io) is safe?

I've looked at other examples, but it seems most are for the previous version of googlesheets

Answer 1

On 21-Jul-2021 googlesheets4 deprecated some of its function when releasing v1.0.0.

I have updated volfi's answer to work with googlesheets4 v1.0.0.
It also works when deploying to shinyapps.io.

Set up non-interactive authentication

library(googlesheets4)
    
# Set authentication token to be stored in a folder called `.secrets`
options(gargle_oauth_cache = ".secrets")

# Authenticate manually
gs4_auth()

# If successful, the previous step stores a token file.
# Check that a file has been created with:
list.files(".secrets/")

# Check that the non-interactive authentication works by first deauthorizing:
gs4_deauth()

# Authenticate using token. If no browser opens, the authentication works.
gs4_auth(cache = ".secrets", email = "[email protected]")

Example - add data to Gooogle Sheet

Create a Google Sheet on Google Sheets and copy the sheet's url.

library(googlesheets4)
gs4_auth(cache=".secrets", email="[email protected]")

ss <- gs4_get("https://docs.google.com/path/to/your/sheet")
sheet_append(ss, data.frame(time=Sys.time()))

If deploying your app to shinyapps.io make sure to deploy the file in the .secrets folder.