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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T07:37:43+00:00

I need to upload a file/document to Google Docs on a GAE application. This

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I need to upload a file/document to Google Docs on a GAE application. This should be simple enough, but I’m having a lot of trouble with the API.

The context:

import gdata.docs.service

client = gdata.docs.service.DocsService()
client.ClientLogin('gmail', 'pass')

ms = gdata.MediaSource(#what goes in here?)
client.Upload(media_source=ms, title='title')

To upload I’m using client.Upload(), which takes a MediaSource (wrapper) object as a parameter. However, MediaSource() seems to only accept a filepath for a document: 'C:/Docs/ex.doc'.

Since I’m on GAE with no filesystem, I can only access the file through the Blobstore or a direct URL to the file. But how do I input that into MediaSource()?

There seems to be a way in Java to accomplish this by using MediaByteArraySource(), but nothing for Python.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If anyone is curious, here’s how I solved this problem using the Document List API.

    I didn’t want to use the Drive SDK since it does complicate a lot of things. It’s much simpler with the List API to just authenticate/login without the need for some OAuth trickery. This is using version 2.0.14 of the gdata Python library, which is not the current version (2.0.17), but it seems to have a simpler upload mechanism.

    There’s also slightly more (still sparse) documentation online for 2.0.14, though I had to piece this together from various sources and trial & error. The downside is that you cannot upload pdf’s with this version. This code will not work with 2.0.17.

    Here’s the code:

    import gdata.docs.service
import gdata.docs.data
from google.appengine.api import urlfetch

# get file from url
result = urlfetch.fetch('http://example.com/test.docx')
headers = result.headers
data = result.content

# authenticate client object
client = gdata.docs.service.DocsService()
client.ClientLogin('gmail', 'password')

# create MediaSource file wrapper
ms = gdata.MediaSource(file_handle=result.content, 
content_type=headers['content-type'], 
content_length=int(headers['content-length']))

# upload specific folder, return URL of doc
google_doc_name = 'title'
folder_uri = '/feeds/folders/private/full/folder:j7XO8SJj...'
entry = client.Upload(ms, google_doc_name, folder_or_uri=secret.G_FOLDER_URI)
edit_url = entry.GetAlternateLink().href
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