Google Drive API Key which is read only

Question

Our server is customer deployed and uses a Google Drive API key to obtain a tutorial file listing via

https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files?q=%27FILE_ID%27+in+parents+and+trashed=false&maxResults=1000&key=API_KEY&fields=files(name,webViewLink,id,kind,mimeType)

and file contents via

https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/files/FILE_ID/export&key=API_KEY

It is unclear how we can set that API key to be read only though. I do not see anything on these pages for example,

https://developers.google.com/drive/api/guides/about-auth https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/api-keys

Answer 1

The restrictions you can set to an API key can be found here, so it is not possible to do it this way. Now, the way to achieve what you are trying to do would be by setting up the project with the correct OAuth scopes and using read only scopes, but that can limit your implementation as sometimes the API needs more scopes.

For example, if you were trying to list users using the Directory API, you can see the list of scopes needed here. If you check the list you will see that there is a read only scope listed there.

So, in your project you could just use this specific scope for your implementation, but again some actions require more than just this scope to work, so you could be limited by that as well depending on what your implementation is doing.

Same example for the Drive API in your case. The list of scopes for the Files: list method are here, and you also have read only scopes as you can see in the image below.