It's pretty hard to understand what I'm meant to do for a CLI app instead here. Are they removing all versions of the "copy and paste this code" auth flow?

Do I need to spin up a localhost web server on a port instead? How am I supposed to do that sensibly on a remote server that I'm SSHing into?

Also that announcement seemed to indicate that localhost: redirects were going to be disabled too, wouldn't that make the local web server option not work either?

I swear, obtaining an OAuth token to interact with my Google account is the new hardest problem in computer science. Oh for a GitHub-style personal access token!

I'm collecting notes on how to address this here: https://github.com/simonw/google-drive-to-sqlite/issues/39

It looks like the localhost redirects are being disabled for "iOS, Android and Chrome app OAuth client types" so hopefully I can still use those by spinning up a localhost web server after all.

My reading is that a localhost web server on a port is the way to go.

This aligns with what nearly all the other cloud providers do with oauth.

> How am I supposed to do that sensibly on a remote server that I'm SSHing into?

If you want to see rclone's solution then check out

https://rclone.org/remote_setup/

It's a bit of a pain!

> Also that announcement seemed to indicate that localhost: redirects were going to be disabled too, wouldn't that make the local web server option not work either?

As you noted below that is only for Android, IOS and ChromeOS. I hadn't noticed that before though...

> I swear, obtaining an OAuth token to interact with my Google account is the new hardest problem in computer science.

Ha ha!

I note that you can get "rclone authorize" to do it if you want as you can set the scopes and the client id / client secret.

Considering the GCloud SDK CLI Auth uses the copy/paste this code auth flow for certain scenarios, this will be interesting.

They literally couldn't care less.

Either you're a sticky customer and you'll figure it out,

or you're a high value customer that they'll sick an engineer or two on for a week to re-tool.

They do. not. care.

The replacement flow requires gcloud on the machine using the browser to login. The command is 'gcloud auth login --no-browser'

There used to be one blog that explained how you could roll oAuth. Then v2 came out and they gave up.

It wasn't T.J Holowaychuk but it was that time. Google doesn't give me shit but back in 2010 there was one post that everyone was working against.

gTakeout[0] also includes this file meta and allows incremental downloads. Ingesting from a local Takeout archive as an additional source for your tool mitigates some of this auth wonkiness and depreciations.

[0]https://takeout.google.com/