Is it possible to share a file publicly through Google Drive API

Question

I am working on Google drive application which will allow user to create file which must be public.

I could see some example where we can create a file

Answer 1

I think that would be nice to show the code example based on the answer which provided by Nivco. Using Javascript you can do it like that:

var google = require('googleapis');
var _ = require('lodash-node/compat');
var Q = require('q');   
var OAuth2 = google.auth.OAuth2; 


var CLIENT_ID = '...';
var CLIENT_SECRET = '...';
var REDIRECT_URL = '...';

var shareFile = function (fileName) {
  var deferred = Q.defer();
  var drive = google.drive('v2');
  var auth = new OAuth2(CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET, REDIRECT_URL);

  drive.files.list({auth: auth}, function (err, res) {
    var foundFile = _.first(_.filter(res.items, {title: fileName, "explicitlyTrashed": false}));

    if (!foundFile) {
        deferred.reject('File ' + fileName + ' has not been found.');
        return;
    }

    drive.permissions.list({fileId: foundFile.id, auth: auth}, function (err, res) {

        if (_.isEmpty(_.find(res.items, 'role', 'reader'))) {
            var body = {
                'value': 'default',
                'type': 'anyone',
                'role': 'reader'
            };

            drive.permissions.insert({
                fileId: foundFile.id,
                resource: body,
                auth: auth
            }, function (err, res, body) {
                deferred.resolve(body);
            });
        }
    });
});
return deferred.promise;

};

Answer 2

You can set the Access Control List of the file using the Permissions feed. The documentation is located here:

https://developers.google.com/drive/v2/reference/permissions

To make a file public you will need to assign the role reader to the type anyone

Then, if you want a link to share to people, you can grab the webContentLink URL returned in the File metadata in the API, it will allow any users to download the file. You can also use it to embed the shared file into HTML (for instance images in <img> tags) .