internal-projects/19_curl-and-netcat-tips.md

In jennybc/googlesheets: Manage Google Spreadsheets from R

output: github_document

Parking some command line stuff from recent conversations with Craig Citro. Sometimes it's nice to cut R and httr out of the picture entirely. Or at least eavesdrop.

curl

googlesheets has unexported and equivalent functions that reveal current access token (do this in R, obviously):

## library(googlesheets)
## gs_auth() or whatever's necessary to get into auth state w/ correct user
googlesheets:::access_token()

Get info about the user associated with current access token:

curl -H 'Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN_GOES_HERE' https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/about

Reveal the scopes associated with an access token:

curl 'https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v2/tokeninfo?access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN_GOES_HERE'

netcat

Use this if you want to see exactly what httr is sending out.

I had convinced myself that Google tokens were being sent as query string parameters, versus the recommended header method. I was wrong and Craig showed me how to check this for myself.

In the shell

nc -l 8080

which opens netcat, listening on port 8080.

Back in R

httr::GET('http://127.0.0.1:8080/any/path/here',
          config = c(token = get_google_token()))

The GET call will hang until you hit ctrl-c in the netcat terminal, but you'll see the whole request there.

jennybc/googlesheets documentation built on Feb. 8, 2022, 11:48 p.m.