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Asked: 2026-06-02T20:56:55+00:00

I’m working on a Google Drive interface for Emacs. The concept is that Emacs

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I’m working on a Google Drive interface for Emacs. The concept is that Emacs could provide a platform-agnostic way to load, modify and save text documents stored in Google Drive. I’ve registered my app and can authenticate with OAuth2 and get a file listing with the Docs List API, but when I try to execute an Insert with the Google Drive API, I see an error:

“The authenticated user has not installed the app with client id …”

Reading further, it seems I need to publish my Emacs application in the Chrome Web Store to get access to the Drive API. That doesn’t make sense to me…I noticed that there is a FUSE project in development for Google Drive, which suggests that native development is possible. When I skimmed the code, however, I didn’t see a Chrome Web Store component to getting it working.

Am I trying to misuse the API, or is there an route to make this work that makes more sense?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    EDIT:

    According to Ali Afshar, of the Google Drive team, installation is no longer required to use this API. So what follows may no longer be relevant, but will be left for historical purposes.

    So, first off the API does not support application development in the sense that we are both doing it, I wouldn’t use the word native though. The good news is I have been doing some research and Google Drive is really just a rebranding of Google Docs. So the Google Docs API could be a good choice as well for the same purposes.

    Anyway, here’s the steps to solve the error: “The authenticated user has not installed the app with client id …” Which is a 403 error, for the sake of this answer. These steps assume you have set up an app in the chrome web store as is required, and installed it. I am working on my local machine too, with my project: http://github.com/tom-dignan/gdrive-cli which I have gotten past this error, so I think you should keep plugging away at your emacs version, because I think we can make this work.

    a. Open the Google APIs console.

    b. Confirm you’ve already enabled the apis under “API Access” both the API and SDK for Google drive should be enabled. There you get your client secrets/api keys and such. I am almost positive you’ve done this already, so go ahead to C. (this is here for others who may have missed it)

    c. In the left navigation bar, under “Drive SDK” you will need to do the following:

    1. Add a “Support URL” (required)

    2. Add at least a small 16×16 application icon (required)

    3. Add “OAuth Client ID (Required)” under Drive Integration (I was just tinkering and this seems to be the key field.)

    4. Add “Open URL (Required) URL to open for your app from the google drive UI.”

    5. Check off “Multiple File Support”

    6. Add some MIME types and file extensions, “text/plain”, and txt for example

    7. Add the the auth scopes:

      https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email

      https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile

    Don’t bother trying to add the auth scopes for Google Docs here, because it won’t work. Google does not want us to use it that way because files that drive apps create should be private to that app. Integration with Google Docs will have to be separate.

    Now I know you must be thinking “why do I have to add some of these…” It’s because the form makes them required fields. In mine, I put a couple URLs that point to static HTML pages.

    Once you’ve done the above, clean up your state and reinstall your chrome app. Then try your code again, and it should stop giving you a 403.

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