Python Quickstart

Complete the steps described in the rest of this page to create a simple Python command-line application that makes requests to the Drive API.


To run this quickstart, you'll need:

  • Python 2.6 or greater
  • The pip package management tool
  • A Google account with Google Drive enabled

Step 1: Turn on the Drive API


Enable the Drive API


Step 2: Install the Google Client Library

Run the following command to install the library using pip:


See the library's installation page for the alternative installation options.

Step 3: Set up the sample

Create a file named in your working directory and copy in the following code:

from __future__ import print_function
import pickle
import os.path
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from google_auth_oauthlib.flow import InstalledAppFlow
from google.auth.transport.requests import Request

# If modifying these scopes, delete the file token.pickle.
SCOPES = ['']

def main():
    """Shows basic usage of the Drive v3 API.
    Prints the names and ids of the first 10 files the user has access to.
    creds = None
    # The file token.pickle stores the user's access and refresh tokens, and is
    # created automatically when the authorization flow completes for the first
    # time.
    if os.path.exists('token.pickle'):
        with open('token.pickle', 'rb') as token:
            creds = pickle.load(token)
    # If there are no (valid) credentials available, let the user log in.
    if not creds or not creds.valid:
        if creds and creds.expired and creds.refresh_token:
            flow = InstalledAppFlow.from_client_secrets_file(
                'credentials.json', SCOPES)
            creds = flow.run_local_server(port=0)
        # Save the credentials for the next run
        with open('token.pickle', 'wb') as token:
            pickle.dump(creds, token)


    # Call the Drive v3 API
    results = service.files().list(
        pageSize=10, fields="nextPageToken, files(id, name)").execute()
    items = results.get('files', [])

    if not items:
        print('No files found.')
        for item in items:
            print(u'{0} ({1})'.format(item['name'], item['id']))

if __name__ == '__main__':

Step 4: Run the sample

Run the sample using the following command:



  2. Click the Accept button.



Further reading



AttributeError: 'Module_six_moves_urllib_parse' object has no attribute 'urlparse'

This error can occur in Mac OSX where the default installation of the six module (a dependency of this library) is loaded before the one that pip installed. To fix the issue, add pip's install location to the PYTHONPATH system environment variable:

  1. Determine pip's install location with the following command:

    pip show six | grep "Location:" | cut -d " " -f2
  2. Add the following line to your ~/.bashrc file, replacing <pip_install_path> with the value determined above:

    export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:<pip_install_path>
  3. Reload your ~/.bashrc file in any open terminal windows using the following command:

    source ~/.bashrc

TypeError: sequence item 0: expected str instance, bytes found

This error is due to a bug in httplib2, and upgrading to the latest version should resolve it:

pip install --upgrade httplib2

Cannot uninstall 'six'. It is a distutils installed project...

When running the pip install command you may receive the following error:

Cannot uninstall 'six'. It is a distutils installed project and thus we
cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to
only a partial uninstall.

This can happen on Mac OSX when pip attempts to upgrade the six package that came pre-installed. To work around this issue you can add the flag --ignore-installed six to the pip install command listed in Step 2.

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