Google Actions - Access to Calendar API with access token fails

Question

I followed the instructions in this great post, to setup account linking between my app's server and google actions.

In the auth process, I requested "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar" scope permission.

I managed to get the auth token on my server by calling

app.getUser().accessToken

But when I make a request to googleapi calendar, using this piece of code:

const google = require('googleapis');
var calendar = google.calendar('v3');

var eventData = {
    auth: myAuthToken,
    calendarId: 'primary',
    resource: {
        'summary': 'My Event',
        'description': 'Event desc',
        'start': {
            'dateTime': '2017-06-11',
        },
        'transparency': 'transparent',
        'visibility': 'private',
        'colorId': 'blue'
    }
};

calendar.events.insert(eventData, 
  function(err, event) {
    if (err) {
      console.log(err)
    }
});

I get is this error:

{ Error: Login Required
    at Request._callback (\node_modules\google-auth-library\lib\transporters.js:85:15)
    at Request.self.callback (\node_modules\request\request.js:188:22)
    at emitTwo (events.js:106:13)
    at Request.emit (events.js:191:7)
    at Request.<anonymous> (\node_modules\request\request.js:1171:10)
    at emitOne (events.js:96:13)
    at Request.emit (events.js:188:7)
    at IncomingMessage.<anonymous> (\node_modules\request\request.js:1091:12)
    at IncomingMessage.g (events.js:291:16)
    at emitNone (events.js:91:20)
  code: 401,
  errors:
   [ { domain: 'global',
       reason: 'required',
       message: 'Login Required',
       locationType: 'header',
       location: 'Authorization' } ] }

Is there any additional authentication steps I should follow?

Answer 1

I think the issue is that the structure of what you're using as the auth parameter isn't correct. You're passing it a string token, while it should be an OAuth2 object. See https://github.com/google/google-api-nodejs-client#making-authenticated-requests for details, but in short you will need to:

1. Create an OAuth2 object

var OAuth2 = google.auth.OAuth2;
var oauth2Client = new OAuth2(
  YOUR_CLIENT_ID,
  YOUR_CLIENT_SECRET,
  YOUR_REDIRECT_URL
);

2. Set the credentials (the access token).

oauth2Client.setCredentials({
  access_token: 'ACCESS TOKEN HERE'
});

3. Use this oauth2Client object in the auth parameter in your event data / call.

var eventData = {
    auth: oauth2Client,
    ...
};