python

oauth2l

oauth2l (pronounced "oauth tool") is a simple command-line tool for working with Google OAuth 2.0. Its primary use is to fetch and print OAuth 2.0 access tokens, which can be used with other command-line tools and shell scripts.

This tool also demonstrates how to design a simple and easy-to-use OAuth 2.0 client experience. If you need to reimplement this functionality in another programming language, please use Go OAuth2l as reference code.

Overview

oauth2l supports all Google OAuth 2.0 authentication flows for both user accounts and service accounts in different environments:

• When running inside Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Google Container Engine (GKE), it uses the credentials of the current service account if it is available.

• When running inside user context that has an active Google Cloud SDK (gcloud) session, it uses the current gcloud credentials.

• When running with command option --json xxx, where xxx points to a JSON credential file downloaded from Google Cloud Console, oauth2l uses the file to start an OAuth session. The file can be either a service account key or an OAuth client ID.

• When running with command option --sso {email}, it invokes an external sso command to retrieve Single Sign-on (SSO) access token.

NOTE: oauth2l caches the OAuth credentials in user's home directory to avoid prompting user repeatedly.

Install

# Mac only. Install `pip` first.
$ sudo easy_install pip

# Install `oauth2l` under the OS, typically "/usr/local/bin".
$ pip install google-oauth2l --upgrade

# If you see an error on OS X El Capitan or up, please try
$ pip install google-oauth2l --upgrade --ignore-installed

# Install `oauth2l` under the current user, typically "~/.local/bin" (on Linux)
# and "~/Library/Python/2.7/bin" (on Mac).
$ pip install --user google-oauth2l

Command Options

--json

Specifies an OAuth credential file, either an OAuth client ID or a Service Account key, to start the OAuth flow. You can download the file from Google Cloud Console.

$ oauth2l fetch --json ~/service_account.json cloud-platform

--sso and --sso_cli

Using an external Single Sign-on (SSO) command to fetch OAuth token. The command outputs an OAuth access token to its stdout. The default command is for Google's corporate SSO. For example:

$ sso me@example.com scope1 scope2

Then use oauth2l with the SSO CLI:

$ oauth2l header --sso me@example.com --sso_cli /usr/bin/sso cloud-platform
$ oauth2l header --sso me@google.com cloud-platform

--jwt

When this option is set and the json file specified in the --json option is a service account key file, a JWT token signed by the service account private key will be generated. When this option is set, no scope list is needed but a single JWT audience must be provided. See how to construct the audience here.

Example:

oauth2l fetch --jwt --json ~/service_account.json https://pubsub.googleapis.com/google.pubsub.v1.Publisher

Commands

fetch

Fetch and print an access token for the specified OAuth scopes. For example, the following command prints access token for the following OAuth2 scopes:

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform

$ oauth2l fetch userinfo.email cloud-platform
ya29.zyxwvutsrqpnmolkjihgfedcba

$ oauth2l fetch -f json userinfo.email cloud-platform
{
  "access_token": "ya29.zyxwvutsrqpnmolkjihgfedcba",
  "token_expiry": "2017-02-27T21:20:47Z",
  "user_agent": "oauth2l/1.0.0",
  ...
}

NOTE: the -f flag specifies the output format. The supported formats are: bare (default), header, json, json_compact, pretty.

header

The same as fetch, except the output is in HTTP header format:

$ oauth2l header userinfo.email
Authorization: Bearer ya29.zyxwvutsrqpnmolkjihgfedcba

The header command is designed to be easy to use with curl. For example, the following command uses the PubSub API to list all PubSub topics.

$ curl -H "$(oauth2l header pubsub)" https://pubsub.googleapis.com/v1/projects/my-project-id/topics

If you need to call Google APIs frequently using curl, you can define a shell alias for it. For example:

$ alias gcurl='curl -H "$(oauth2l header cloud-platform)" -H "Content-Type: application/json" '
$ gcurl 'https://pubsub.googleapis.com/v1/projects/my-project-id/topics'

info

Print information about a valid token. This always includes the list of scopes and expiration time. If the token has either the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email or https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.me scope, it also prints the email address of the authenticated identity.

$ oauth2l info $(oauth2l fetch pubsub)
{
    "expires_in": 3599,
    "scope": "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/pubsub",
    "email": "user@gmail.com"
    ...
}

test

Test a token. This sets an exit code of 0 for a valid token and 1 otherwise, which can be useful in shell pipelines.

$ oauth2l test ya29.zyxwvutsrqpnmolkjihgfedcba
$ echo $?
0
$ oauth2l test ya29.justkiddingmadethisoneup
$ echo $?
1

reset

Reset all tokens cached locally. We cache previously retrieved tokens in the file ~/.oauth2l.token.

$ oauth2l reset