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Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google.
This notebook covers how to load documents from Google Drive. Currently, only Google Docs are supported.

Prerequisites

  1. Create a Google Cloud project or use an existing project
  2. Enable the Google Drive API
  3. Authorize credentials for desktop app
  4. pip install -U google-api-python-client google-auth-httplib2 google-auth-oauthlib

🧑 Instructions for ingesting your Google docs data

Set the environmental variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS to an empty string (""). By default, the GoogleDriveLoader expects the credentials.json file to be located at ~/.credentials/credentials.json, but this is configurable using the credentials_path keyword argument. Same thing with token.json - default path: ~/.credentials/token.json, constructor param: token_path. The first time you use GoogleDriveLoader, you will be displayed with the consent screen in your browser for user authentication. After authentication, token.json will be created automatically at the provided or the default path. Also, if there is already a token.json at that path, then you will not be prompted for authentication. GoogleDriveLoader can load from a list of Google Docs document ids or a folder id. You can obtain your folder and document id from the URL:
When you pass a folder_id by default all files of type document, sheet and pdf are loaded. You can modify this behaviour by passing a file_types argument

Passing in optional file loaders

When processing files other than Google Docs and Google Sheets, it can be helpful to pass an optional file loader to GoogleDriveLoader. If you pass in a file loader, that file loader will be used on documents that do not have a Google Docs or Google Sheets MIME type. Here is an example of how to load an Excel document from Google Drive using a file loader.
The langchain-community package is no longer maintained. Examples that import from langchain_community may be outdated or broken. Use with caution.
You can also process a folder with a mix of files and Google Docs/Sheets using the following pattern:

Extended usage

An external (unofficial) component can manage the complexity of Google Drive : langchain-googledrive It’s compatible with the ̀langchain_community.document_loaders.GoogleDriveLoader and can be used in its place. To be compatible with containers, the authentication uses an environment variable ̀GOOGLE_ACCOUNT_FILE to credential file (for user or service).
By default, all files with these mime-type can be converted to Document.
  • text/text
  • text/plain
  • text/html
  • text/csv
  • text/markdown
  • image/png
  • image/jpeg
  • application/epub+zip
  • application/pdf
  • application/rtf
  • application/vnd.google-apps.document (GDoc)
  • application/vnd.google-apps.presentation (GSlide)
  • application/vnd.google-apps.spreadsheet (GSheet)
  • application/vnd.google.colaboratory (Notebook colab)
  • application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation (PPTX)
  • application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document (DOCX)
It’s possible to update or customize this. See the documentation of GDriveLoader. The corresponding packages must be installed.

Loading auth identities

Authorized identities for each file ingested by Google Drive Loader can be loaded along with metadata per Document.
You can pass load_auth=True, to add Google Drive document access identities to metadata.

Loading extended metadata

Following extra fields can also be fetched within metadata of each Document:
  • full_path - Full path of the file/s in google drive.
  • owner - owner of the file/s.
  • size - size of the file/s.
You can pass load_extended_matadata=True, to add Google Drive document extended details to metadata.

Customize the search pattern

All parameter compatible with Google list() API can be set. To specify the new pattern of the Google request, you can use a PromptTemplate(). The variables for the prompt can be set with kwargs in the constructor. Some pre-formated request are proposed (use {query}, {folder_id} and/or {mime_type}): You can customize the criteria to select the files. A set of predefined filter are proposed:
You can customize your pattern.
The conversion can manage in Markdown format:
  • bullet
  • link
  • table
  • titles
Set the attribute return_link to True to export links.

Modes for GSlide and GSheet

The parameter mode accepts different values:
  • “document”: return the body of each document
  • “snippets”: return the description of each file (set in metadata of Google Drive files).
The parameter gslide_mode accepts different values:
  • “single” : one document with <PAGE BREAK>
  • “slide” : one document by slide
  • “elements” : one document for each elements.
The parameter gsheet_mode accepts different values:
  • "single": Generate one document by line
  • "elements" : one document with markdown array and <PAGE BREAK> tags.

Advanced usage

All Google File have a ‘description’ in the metadata. This field can be used to memorize a summary of the document or others indexed tags (See method lazy_update_description_with_summary()). If you use the mode="snippet", only the description will be used for the body. Else, the metadata['summary'] has the field. Sometime, a specific filter can be used to extract some information from the filename, to select some files with specific criteria. You can use a filter. Sometimes, many documents are returned. It’s not necessary to have all documents in memory at the same time. You can use the lazy versions of methods, to get one document at a time. It’s better to use a complex query in place of a recursive search. For each folder, a query must be applied if you activate recursive=True.