This post is inspired by Patrick McKenzie’s reminder that sometimes you don’t need a database:

So if you’re building out a quick CRUD app for e.g. internal use, Google Docs as a backend (consumed via JSON) is *surprisingly* powerful. — Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) July 5, 2014

In this tutorial, we’ll use Anton Burnashev’s excellent gspread Python package to read, write, and delete data from a Google Spreadsheet with just a few lines of code.

Google Drive API and Service Accounts

At the risk of being Captain Obvious, you’re going to need a spreadsheet if you want to follow along with this post. If you don’t have one on hand that’s full of juicy data, might I suggest you make a copy of this spreadsheet with contact information for all United States legislators? (Side note: Ian Webster uses this data in conjunction with Twilio to make it easy for citizens to call congress).

To programmatically access your spreadsheet, you’ll need to create a service account and OAuth2 credentials from the Google API Console. If you’ve been traumatized by OAuth2 development before, don’t worry; service accounts are way easier to use.

Follow along with the steps and GIF below. You’ll be in and out of the console in 60 seconds (much like Nic Cage in your favorite Nic Cage movie).

Go to the Google APIs Console. Create a new project. Click Enable API. Search for and enable the Google Drive API. Create credentials for a Web Server to access Application Data. Name the service account and grant it a Project Role of Editor. Download the JSON file. Copy the JSON file to your code directory and rename it to client_secret . json

There is one last required step to authorize your app, and it’s easy to miss!

Find the client_email inside client_secret.json. Back in your spreadsheet, click the Share button in the top right, and paste the client email into the People field to give it edit rights. Hit Send.

If you skip this step, you’ll get a gspread.exceptions.SpreadsheetNotFound error when you try to access the spreadsheet from Python.

We’re done with the boring part! Now onto the code.

Read Data from a Spreadsheet with Python

With credentials in place (you did copy them to your code directory, right?) accessing a Google Spreadsheet in Python requires just two packages:

oauth2client – to authorize with the Google Drive API using OAuth 2.0 gspread – to interact with Google Spreadsheets

Install these packages with: