Google Oauth - NOT Login

Ask us anything How do I?
1

Hey there!

I have a simple question, but not so simple to answer as it seems. When I google it or scout for answers anywhere I always land on Oauth for Google User Login.

I am not very proficient when it comes to authorizations and tokens etc. Not really a clue, so sorry in advance if I sound naive and uneducated. Hope you will help me anyway.

My problem is that I want to connect to Google Dev Console Services. I want to build a few smaller web apps that help my company to achieve things. Such as checking Google API for Indexing Status of Website URLs.

Google mostly requires Oauth2 connections for that. I believe I would have to use XANO for that, could I be right there?
Nonetheless, I want to ask now here as well.

I have no clue how that would technically work. I simply want a user on my weweb platform to be able to do tasks that in the background then connect with the google API and does background tasks as said before.
In this case the application needs the auth from google, not the user auth. They are simply dropping some urls in a form and that’s all.

And I honestly have no clue how to achieve that. Thanks already in advance.

2

Hey @LarsL :wave:

This is a vast subject, hard to answer in a single post.

It really depends on the Google services you want to use. Some require a simple API key, other a more complex connection mechanism, which can sometimes be Oauth. To be sure which one needs which, you should really refer to Google’s documentation for each service.

What Oauth does behind the scene, is that it’ll tell your backend service (here Xano) that the user is known by Google and has a specific email. Then, Xano will authenticate him/her against this email and create a token that can be used by WeWeb to authenticate the user against the backend. But when using Google services, the backend (Xano) will use the token provided by Google to authenticate against Google servers.

In the case of a simple API key, you just need to use the API key in your API calls to Google, as the key will authenticate the user.