Managing Shared (formerly Team) Drives with Python and the Google Drive API

2023 UPDATE: We are working to put updated versions of all the code into GitHub... stay tuned. The link will provided in all posts once the code sample(s) is(are) available.

2019 UPDATE: "G Suite" is now called "Google Workspace", "Team Drives" is now known as "Shared Drives", and the corresponding supportsTeamDrives flag has been renamed to supportsAllDrives. Please take note of these changes regarding the post below.

NOTE 1: Team Drives is only available for G Suite Business Standard users or higher. If you're developing an application for Team Drives, you'll need similar access.
NOTE 2: The code featured here is also available as a video + overview post as part of this series.

Introduction

Team Drives is a relatively new feature from the Google Drive team, created to solve some of the issues of a user-centric system in larger organizations. Team Drives are owned by an organization rather than a user and with its use, locations of files and folders won't be a mystery any more. While your users do have to be a G Suite Business (or higher) customer to use Team Drives, the good news for developers is that you won't have to write new apps from scratch or learn a completely different API.

Instead, Team Drives features are accessible through the same Google Drive API you've come to know so well with Python. In this post, we'll demonstrate a sample Python app that performs core features that all developers should be familiar with. By the time you've finished reading this post and the sample app, you should know how to:

• Create Team Drives
• Add members to Team Drives
• Create a folder in Team Drives
• Import/upload files to Team Drives folders

Using the Google Drive API

The demo script requires creating files and folders, so you do need full read-write access to Google Drive. The scope you need for that is:

• 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive' — Full (read-write) access to Google Drive

If you're new to using Google APIs, we recommend reviewing earlier posts & videos covering the setting up projects and the authorization boilerplate so that we can focus on the main app. Once we've authorized our app, assume you have a service endpoint to the API and have assigned it to the DRIVE variable.

Create Team Drives

New Team Drives can be created with DRIVE.teamdrives().create(). Two things are required to create a Team Drive: 1) you should name your Team Drive. To make the create process idempotent, you need to create a unique request ID so that any number of identical calls will still only result in a single Team Drive being created. It's recommended that developers use a language-specific UUID library. For Python developers, that's the uuid module. From the API response, we return the new Team Drive's ID. Check it out:

def create_td(td_name):
    request_id = str(uuid.uuid4())
    body = {'name': td_name}
    return DRIVE.teamdrives().create(body=body,
            requestId=request_id, fields='id').execute().get('id')

Add members to Team Drives

To add members/users to Team Drives, you only need to create a new permission, which can be done with  DRIVE.permissions().create(), similar to how you would share a file in regular Drive with another user.  The pieces of information you need for this request are the ID of the Team Drive, the new member's email address as well as the desired role... choose from: "organizer", "owner", "writer", "commenter", "reader". Here's the code:

def add_user(td_id, user, role='commenter'):
    body = {'type': 'user', 'role': role, 'emailAddress': user}
    return DRIVE.permissions().create(body=body, fileId=td_id,
            supportsTeamDrives=True, fields='id').execute().get('id')

Some additional notes on permissions: the user can only be bestowed permissions equal to or less than the person/admin running the script... IOW, they cannot grant someone else greater permission than what they have. Also, if a user has a certain role in a Team Drive, they can be granted greater access to individual elements in the Team Drive. Users who are not members of a Team Drive can still be granted access to Team Drive contents on a per-file basis.

Create a folder in Team Drives

Nothing to see here! Yep, creating a folder in Team Drives is identical to creating a folder in regular Drive, with DRIVE.files().create(). The only difference is that you pass in a Team Drive ID rather than regular Drive folder ID. Of course, you also need a folder name too. Here's the code:

def create_td_folder(td_id, folder):
    body = {'name': folder, 'mimeType': FOLDER_MIME, 'parents': [td_id]}
    return DRIVE.files().create(body=body,
            supportsTeamDrives=True, fields='id').execute().get('id')

Import/upload files to Team Drives folders

Uploading files to a Team Drives folder is also identical to to uploading to a normal Drive folder, and also done with DRIVE.files().create(). Importing is slightly different than uploading because you're uploading a file and converting it to a G Suite/Google Apps document format, i.e., uploading CSV as a Google Sheet, or plain text or Microsoft Word® file as Google Docs. In the sample app, we tackle the former:

def import_csv_to_td_folder(folder_id, fn, mimeType):
    body = {'name': fn, 'mimeType': mimeType, 'parents': [folder_id]}
    return DRIVE.files().create(body=body, media_body=fn+'.csv',
            supportsTeamDrives=True, fields='id').execute().get('id')

The secret to importing is the MIMEtype. That tells Drive whether you want conversion to a G Suite/Google Apps format (or not). The same is true for exporting. The import and export MIMEtypes supported by the Google Drive API can be found in my SO answer here.

Driver app

All these functions are great but kind-of useless without being called by a main application, so here we are:

FOLDER_MIME = 'application/vnd.google-apps.folder'
SOURCE_FILE = 'inventory' # on disk as 'inventory.csv'
SHEETS_MIME = 'application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet'

td_id = create_td('Corporate shared TD')
print('** Team Drive created')
perm_id = add_user(td_id, 'email@example.com')
print('** User added to Team Drive')
folder_id = create_td_folder(td_id, 'Manufacturing data')
print('** Folder created in Team Drive')
file_id = import_csv_to_td_folder(folder_id, SOURCE_FILE, SHEETS_MIME)
print('** CSV file imported as Google Sheets in Team Drives folder')

The first set of variables represent some MIMEtypes we need to use as well as the CSV file we're uploading to Drive and requesting it be converted to Google Sheets format. Below those definitions are calls to all four functions described above.

Conclusion

If you run the script, you should get output that looks something like this, with each print() representing each API call:

$ python3 td_demo.py
** Team Drive created
** User added to Team Drive
** Folder created in Team Drive
** CSV file imported as Google Sheets in Team Drives folder

When the script has completed, you should have a new Team Drives folder called "Corporate shared TD", and within, a folder named "Manufacturing data" which contains a Google Sheets file called "inventory".

Below is the entire script for your convenience which runs on both Python 2 and Python 3 (unmodified!)—by using, copying, and/or modifying this code or any other piece of source from this blog, you implicitly agree to its Apache2 license:

from __future__ import print_function
import uuid

from apiclient import discovery
from httplib2 import Http
from oauth2client import file, client, tools

SCOPES = 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive'
store = file.Storage('storage.json')
creds = store.get()
if not creds or creds.invalid:
    flow = client.flow_from_clientsecrets('client_secret.json', SCOPES)
    creds = tools.run_flow(flow, store)
DRIVE = discovery.build('drive', 'v3', http=creds.authorize(Http()))

def create_td(td_name):
    request_id = str(uuid.uuid4()) # random unique UUID string
    body = {'name': td_name}
    return DRIVE.teamdrives().create(body=body,
            requestId=request_id, fields='id').execute().get('id')

def add_user(td_id, user, role='commenter'):
    body = {'type': 'user', 'role': role, 'emailAddress': user}
    return DRIVE.permissions().create(body=body, fileId=td_id,
            supportsTeamDrives=True, fields='id').execute().get('id')

def create_td_folder(td_id, folder):
    body = {'name': folder, 'mimeType': FOLDER_MIME, 'parents': [td_id]}
    return DRIVE.files().create(body=body,
            supportsTeamDrives=True, fields='id').execute().get('id')

def import_csv_to_td_folder(folder_id, fn, mimeType):
    body = {'name': fn, 'mimeType': mimeType, 'parents': [folder_id]}
    return DRIVE.files().create(body=body, media_body=fn+'.csv',
            supportsTeamDrives=True, fields='id').execute().get('id')

FOLDER_MIME = 'application/vnd.google-apps.folder'
SOURCE_FILE = 'inventory' # on disk as 'inventory.csv'... CHANGE!
SHEETS_MIME = 'application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet'

td_id = create_td('Corporate shared TD')
print('** Team Drive created')
perm_id = add_user(td_id, 'email@example.com') # CHANGE!
print('** User added to Team Drive')
folder_id = create_td_folder(td_id, 'Manufacturing data')
print('** Folder created in Team Drive')
file_id = import_csv_to_td_folder(folder_id, SOURCE_FILE, SHEETS_MIME)
print('** CSV file imported as Google Sheets in Team Drives folder')

As with our other code samples, you can now customize it to learn more about the API, integrate into other apps for your own needs, for a mobile frontend, sysadmin script, or a server-side backend!

Code challenge

Write a simple application that moves folders (and its files or folders) in regular Drive to Team Drives. Each folder you move should be a corresponding folder in Team Drives. Remember that files in Team Drives can only have one parent, and the same goes for folders.