Can't write acl rules to primary calendar in google service account - google-api

Question

So I have set up a google service account for one of my apps. My intention is to keep a google calendar associated with the admin portal that all of the admins can post events to. I have got the JWT auth working I can post events to the calendar and perform other API actions. However, for some reason I cannot change the access control rules on the primary calendar. It is initialized with a single acl rule (role: owner, scope: {type: user, value: service_account_id}), and when I try to add public read access (role: reader, scope: {type: default}) like so:
POST https://www.googleapis.com/calendar/v3/calendars/primary/acl
Authorization: Bearer my_jwt_here
{
"role":"reader",
"scope":{
"type":"default"
}
}
I get the following error:
{
"error": {
"errors": [
{
"domain": "calendar",
"reason": "cannotRemoveLastCalendarOwnerFromAcl",
"message": "Cannot remove the last owner of a calendar from the access control list."
}
],
"code": 403,
"message": "Cannot remove the last owner of a calendar from the access control list."
}
}
This doesn't make any sense to me because this request shouldn't be trying to remove any access control rules. When I create a secondary calendar and do this I have no issues. When I do this with the primary calendar of my personal google account I have no issues. Is this some behavior specific to service accounts that I am not familiar with or what? I could settle for using a non-primary calendar but it bothers me that this isn't working. Any advice is appreciated.

Answer 1

so I found a weird work around for this issue and im posting here because I could not find SQUAT to help resolve this so hopefully this saves others some hassle.
I will also post some common problems I found when creating a organization-wide calendar (whether this is your use case or not I believe these tips will be helpful) - Jump to the bottom of the solution to this particular error.
First I needed to set up authentication with google calendar:
const { google } = require("googleapis");
const calendar = google.calendar("v3");
const scopes = [
"https://www.googleapis.com/auth/admin.directory.resource.calendar",
"https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar",
"https://www.googleapis.com/auth/admin.directory.user",
];
const path = require("path");
const key = require(path.join(__dirname, "google-cal-api.json"));
I created a service account and then allowed it domain wide delegation with the above listed scopes; then downloaded the key. Now if you want to do actions like create calendar events FOR users within this domain what you have to do is generate a JWT token that 'impersonates' the user whos calendar you wish to interact with; like so
const generateInpersonationKey = (email) => {
var jwtClient = new google.auth.JWT(
key.client_email,
null,
key.private_key,
scopes,
email
);
return jwtClient;
};
To set up a JWT client for the service account itself (and so you can create a calendar people can subscribe to; in our case it was a google calendar to show whos on leave within the workplace; so a calendar that has ALL that people can subscribe and toggle on/off was ideal) you just replace the email with 'null' and it defaults to itself, instead of 'impersonating' someone within the domain wide org.
Creating events are simple, follow the google cal api docs, depending on the auth token will depend on where the calendar is generated
JUMP HERE FOR THE IMMEDIATE SOLUTION TO THE ABOVE
For resolving the issue you pointed out; What I did was set my personal accounts email as an owner of this service accounts calendar with the following NodeJS code:
var request = await calendar.acl.insert({
auth,
calendarId: "primary",
resource: {
role: "owner",
scope: {
type: "user",
value: "callum#orgdomain.com",
},
},
});
I set myself as an owner, then I went to Google Calendar API > Patch (Try Me) filled in the calendarId as the service account with the calendar im trying to restrict; and then rule ID would be the gsuite domain domain:orgdomain.com The body should be
{
"role": "reader",
"scope": {
"type": "domain",
"value": "orgdomain.com"
}
}
And thats how I was able to restrict people within our gsuite domain from deleting or editing custom calendar events. This solution is coming from the perspective of someone who originally inserted the domain ACL as
var request = await calendar.acl.insert({
auth,
calendarId: "primary",
resource: {
role: "owner",
scope: { type: "domain", value: "orgdomain.com" },
},
});
Because adding it as a 'reader' like this messes with the service account ownership and wont allow anything but owner
Hope this has been helpful
Callum