They need something like this as it's hard and flaky to automate Google apps with AI. However, step 2 drops me to a fairly technical looking page where I have to configure Google Cloud. If they had a one click installer to automate Google Apps it would be an absolute killer use case for AI for me.
Google Workspace CLI
191–200 of 316 posts
Re: Google Workspace CLI
#192Generating a good cli isn't all that hard for agentic coding tools. When you do it manually it's highly repetitive work. But all you are doing is low level plumbing. Given some parsed arguments, call a function, return the result (with some formatting, prettying, etc.). In the end it's just a facade for an API, library, or whatever else you want to have a cli for. Easy to write. Easy to test. But manually going through your API resource by resource, parameter by parameter, etc. takes a long time. An LLM just blazes through that in a few minutes. Generate some tests, tweak as needed, and you are good to go.
I did a few CLIs with codex in the last few weeks. I do simple ops with this stuff. I've had a few use cases for new features where previously I would have had to build some kind of quick and dirty admin UI just to use and test a new API feature before being able to integrate it into our product. With a generated cli, I can just play with it from the command line. Or make codex do that for me.
A good cli with a modern command line argument parser, well documented options, bash/zsh auto complete, pretty colors, etc. is generally nice to have. I mapped resources to commands and sub commands, made it add parameters with sensible defaults or optional ones. Then I got lazy and just asked it what else it thought it was missing, it made some suggestions and I gave it the thumbs up and it all got added. I even generated a simple interactive TUI at some point. Because why not? I also made it generate a md skill file explaining how to use the cli that you can just drop in your skills directory.
Re: Google Workspace CLI
#193the most annoying thing with Google Workspace is that you need super admin privilege to properly audit the environment programmatically, I believe because of the cloud-identity api.
Re: Google Workspace CLI
#194I was excited to see this but all of that went away when I realized you need to create an app in GCP to use it. Can't really expect non technical users to set this up across the company.
Can someone explain to me, why Google can't (or does not want to) implement the same auth flow that any other SaaS company uses: # API Keys in Settings 1. Go to Settings -> API Keys Page 2. Create Token (set scope and expiration date) # OAuth flow 1. `gws login` shows url to visit 2. Login with Google profile & select data you want to share 3. Redirect to localhost page confirms authentication I get that I need to co…
Can you name a service you think works like that?
Google have over a billion very non-technical users.
The friction of not having this in the account page that everyone has access too probably saves both parties lots of heartbreak.
Re: Google Workspace CLI
#195I was excited to see this but all of that went away when I realized you need to create an app in GCP to use it. Can't really expect non technical users to set this up across the company.
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Re: Google Workspace CLI
#196I have been working on extrasuite (https://github.com/think41/extrasuite). This is like terraform, but for google drive files.
It provides a git like pull/push workflow to edit sheets/docs/slides. `pull` converts the google file into a local folder with agent friendly files. For example, a google sheet becomes a folder with a .tsv, a formula.json and so on. The agent simply edits these files and `push`es the changes. Similarly, a google doc becomes an XML file that is pure content. The agent edits it and calls push - the tool figures out the right batchUpdate API calls to bring the document in sync.
None of the existing tools allow you to edit documents. Invoking batchUpdate directly is error prone and token inefficient. Extrasuite solves these issues.
In addition, Extrasuite also uses a unique service token that is 1:1 mapped to the user. This means that edits show up as "Alice's agent" in google drive version history. This is secure - agents can only access the specific files or folders you explicitly share with the agent.
This is still very much alpha - but we have been using this internally for our 100 member team. Google sheets, docs, forms and app scripts work great - all using the same pull/push metaphor. Google slides needs some work.
Re: Google Workspace CLI
#197[flagged]
Re: Google Workspace CLI
#198Generating a good cli isn't all that hard for agentic coding tools. When you do it manually it's highly repetitive work. But all you are doing is low level plumbing. Given some parsed arguments, call a function, return the result (with some formatting, prettying, etc.). In the end it's just a facade for an API, library, or whatever else you want to have a cli for. Easy to write. Easy to test. But manually going throu…
But manually going through your API resource by resource, parameter by parameter, etc. takes a long time.
This CLI dynamically generates itself at run time though
gws doesn't ship a static list of commands. It reads Google's own Discovery Service at runtime and builds its entire command surface dynamically
Re: Google Workspace CLI
#199[flagged]
Yeah that github name made my spider senses tingle, large scale credentials harvesting?
Re: Google Workspace CLI
#200Generating a good cli isn't all that hard for agentic coding tools. When you do it manually it's highly repetitive work. But all you are doing is low level plumbing. Given some parsed arguments, call a function, return the result (with some formatting, prettying, etc.). In the end it's just a facade for an API, library, or whatever else you want to have a cli for. Easy to write. Easy to test. But manually going throu…
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