2015-06-14

Motion Google Drive Uploader for OAuth 2.0

Three years ago I wrote the original script to upload video to Google Drive as a trigger from Motion. Unfortunately Google recently removed support for the old security model and you now have to use OAuth 2.0. Also the gdata libraries have been superseded by the Google API Python Client. A few people have written alternatives to my original script quicker than I did, but here's my new version.

Note: I'm not using any third party libraries like PyDrive for example, this script goes straight to the Google APIs. (PyDrive has not been touched for a long time by its author and is missing features).

Motion Google Drive Uploader on Github

Installation

Google setup:


  1. Go to https://code.google.com/apis/console - make sure you're logged in as the correct user for the Drive you want to use.
  2. Use the drop-down at the top of the page to create a project called 'Uploader'.
  3. Click on "Enable an API" then "Drive API" and then click the "Enable API" button
  4. Next go to "APIs & auth -> Credentials" menu and click "Create new Client ID".
  5. Set Application type to "Installed application" and click "Configure Consent Screen"
  6. Set the Product Name to "Uploader"
  7. You'll be returned back to the dialog. Make sure "Installed application" and "other" are selected and then click "Create Client ID".
  8. Download the JSON file.
  9. Rename it to client_secrets.json and put it somewhere like /home/pi/.

Script setup:

  1. Go to /home/pi/ and get the uploader.py from github: git clone https://github.com/jerbly/motion-uploader.git
  2. Update/install Google Python API: sudo pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client
  3. Make uploader.py executable: chmod a+x uploader.py

Configuration:

  1. If you used the git clone command you'll find the example uploader.cfg file in the motion-uploader directory. This now has a couple more options which need setting up. 
  2. oauth/folder - set this to the directory where you have put the client_secrets.json file and where the script can write a credentials. e.g. /home/pi/
  3. docs/snapshot-folder - set this to a public folder name in your drive if you wish to use this feature (explained below).

Initial authentication:

  1. From the command line run the script by hand with your config file and a test avi file e.g. ./uploader.py /home/pi/uploader.cfg /home/pi/test.avi
  2. Copy the URL to your clipboard and paste it into a browser where you are already logged in to Google as the correct user.
  3. Accept and copy the authentication code to the clipboard.
  4. Paste it back in to the command line and hit enter.
  5. This will authenticate you and create a credentials file which will be used for future logins.
Now, finally, you can run up Motion and it should work like it used to.

New feature: Public Snapshot

Motion comes with a feature to periodically take a snapshot regardless of whether motion has been detected. This is a nice feature if you want to have a web site with the latest view from your webcam. You can use Google Drive to host this image rather than installing a web server on your Pi and opening firewalls etc.
  1. Create a public folder in your Google Drive: 
    1. Create a new folder called 'public'
    2. Double click on it
    3. Go to the sharing menu (person icon with + sign)
    4. Click "Advanced" and then "Change..."
    5. Set it to "On - Public on the Web"
  2. Configure your uploader.cfg so docs/snapshot-folder is set to this folder 'public'.
  3. Configure motion.conf to take a snapshot every n seconds named lastsnap.jpg and upload it:
    1. snapshot_interval 300
    2. snapshot_filename lastsnap
    3. on_picture_save /home/pi/motion-uploader/uploader.py /home/pi/uploader.cfg %f snap
To find the public URL that you can bookmark and embed in other pages run the command line with the 'snapurl' option: ./uploader.py /home/pi/uploader.cfg /home/pi/lastsnap.jpg snapurl

It will print something like this: https://googledrive.com/host/{your-folder-id-here}/lastsnap.jpg


1 comment:

peterquinn925 said...

Maybe a human will read this through all the spam.

I've been using this on a raspberry pi 2 to back up my weather database every night. It's been running great for at least 3 years.
I'm upgrading everything to Python3/Ubuntu 20.10 on a Raspi3 and the last piece of the puzzle before I swap the old hardware for the "new" is to get my backup script working.
I have made some trivial modifications to get motion-uploader to work on Python 3. It works fine on small files. On the old Raspi2, I have no problems backing up the 100mb file. But on the Raspi3 and Ubuntu, it fails with "killed". It seems the oom_killer doesn't like it.
Any thoughts?