Why do I get credential read in error on google slide API? - google-api

Question

I downloaded the gsuite developers python code from :
(https://github.com/gsuitedevs/python-samples)
I then enabled api access and downloaded the credentials.json file and ran the quickstart.py in:
(python-samples-master/slides/quickstart) and it worked and outputted
The presentation contains 5 slides:
- Slide #1 contains 4 elements.
- Slide #2 contains 11 elements.
- Slide #3 contains 9 elements.
- Slide #4 contains 5 elements.
- Slide #5 contains 12 elements.
So it worked. Then I tried to run test_snippets.py in:
(python-samples-master/slides/snippets)
And I get an error
======================================================================
ERROR: setUpClass (__main__.SnippetsTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "~/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 1228, in _implicit_credentials_from_files
credentials_filename)
File "~/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 1397, in _get_application_default_credential_from_file
AUTHORIZED_USER + "' or '" + SERVICE_ACCOUNT + "' values)")
oauth2client.client.ApplicationDefaultCredentialsError: 'type' field should be defined (and have one of the 'authorized_user' or 'service_account' values)
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test_snippets.py", line 32, in setUpClass
super(SnippetsTest, cls).setUpClass()
File "~/Desktop/python-samples-master/slides/snippets/base_test.py", line 27, in setUpClass
cls.credentials = cls.create_credentials()
File "~/Desktop/python-samples-master/slides/snippets/base_test.py", line 44, in create_credentials
credentials = GoogleCredentials.get_application_default()
File "~/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 1271, in get_application_default
return GoogleCredentials._get_implicit_credentials()
File "~/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 1256, in _get_implicit_credentials
credentials = checker()
File "~/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 1231, in _implicit_credentials_from_files
extra_help, error)
File "~/anaconda3/lib/python3.7/site-packages/oauth2client/client.py", line 1429, in _raise_exception_for_reading_json
credential_file + extra_help + ': ' + str(error))
oauth2client.client.ApplicationDefaultCredentialsError: An error was encountered while reading json file: ~/Documents/credentials/credentials.json (pointed to by GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable): 'type' field should be defined (and have one of the 'authorized_user' or 'service_account' values)
I definitely have a GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS that points to the same credentials that successfully ran quickstart.py.
Is there something else I need or do I need to change some code to load the credentials data in?
It seems like GoogleCredentials.get_application_default() call is the one that is erroring
def create_credentials(cls):
credentials = GoogleCredentials.get_application_default()
scope = [
'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive',
]
return credentials.create_scoped(scope)

Answer 1

The file pointed to the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS is not a valid service account json file.
Open your service account json file. The beginning of the file should look similar to this:
{
"type": "service_account",
"project_id": "development-123456",
"private_key_id": "19c38bac6560abcdef01234567ac4da7991cbaad",
"private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\nMIIEvQIBADANB