How do I read Google API credentials from a TOML file with Python?

I’m trying to pull some data using the Google Sheets Api. This is the beginning of the code:

# Import the python libraries.
import gspread
from oauth2client.service_account import ServiceAccountCredentials
from pathlib import Path
import os
import json


# Get JSON_DATA from the build environment.
jsondict = json.loads(os.environ['JSON_DATA'])

# Use creds to create a client to interact with the Google Drive API
scope = ['https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds','https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive']
creds = ServiceAccountCredentials.from_json_keyfile_dict(jsondict, scope)
client = gspread.authorize(creds)

# Open the Google Sheet by ID.
sheet1 = client.open_by_key("somekey").sheet1

# Extract all of the records for each row.
sheetdata1 = sheet1.get_all_records()

In the tutorial I am referring to, this is what the author says about the JSON_DATA object:

Note: the ‘JSON_DATA’ variable in the python code is a Netlify build environment variable that I set with JSON format Google API credential information to keep my secret stuff out of the script.

My netlify.toml, which contains the build environment variable has this:

[build]
command = "hugo"
publish = "public"
[build.environment]
HUGO_VERSION = "0.80.0"

[context]
[context.branch-deploy]
command = "hugo -F -b $DEPLOY_PRIME_URL"
[context.deploy-preview]
command = "hugo -F -b $DEPLOY_PRIME_URL"
[context.production]
[context.production.environment]
HUGO_ENV = "production"

I know that to include my credentials downloaded from Google (in a JSON file), I have to put this in the netlify.toml:

[installed]
client_id = "something.apps.googleusercontent.com"
project_id = "someiD"
auth_uri = "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth"
token_uri = "whatevergoeshere"
client_secret = "somesecret"
redirect_uris = [ "something", "http://localhost" ]

but how do I read in these credentials for the Python code? That line seems to indicated that it wants a JSON file only.

Answer

Okay, so you need to copy paste the contents of the json key file in the actual environment variable itself:

JSON_DATA = '{"key":"secret"}'

Not the most straight forward way, but it works.

In order to maintain sanity I would use the web interface to work with those variables.

https://docs.netlify.com/configure-builds/environment-variables/

The first line parses whatever is in the environment variable to a dict. There’s no need in this case to parse the toml itself, as it has already been parsed for you.