GoogleCL Brings Google Services to the Command Line

GoogleCL Brings Google Services to the Command Line Linux/Mac/Windows: Google's new utility, GoogleCL, allows you to access a handful of Google services from any *nix command line. Google's services are pretty easily accessible in their individual webapps, but if you've got a hankering for the command line, this is awesome.

Having Google's services at your fingertips in the Terminal may not sound super cool, but if you want to incorporate, say, fetching Google Calendar events, Google contacts, Google Docs, or Picasa photos into your scripts, GoogleCL is extremely handy (and long overdue). GoogleCL is a python program that can access and perform a number of actions in Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Picasa, and YouTube.

Ubuntu users can download a .deb package and install it right away, though Mac and Windows installation is a bit trickier. If you're the type that will be using GoogleCL, though, it's likely not beyond your skills. Note that before you begin, you'll need Python 2.5 or 2.6 installed, and Windows users will also need previously mentioned Cygwin.

Install GoogleCL

Download both the gdata python client library and GoogleCL. Unzip the tarballs or zip files and note the location of the folders (for the below example, I've left mine in ~/Downloads). Then, open up a Terminal window and type the following commands, entering your password when prompted:

 cd "~/Downloads/gdata-2.0.10/" sudo python setup.py install cd "~/Downloads/googlecl-0.9.5/" sudo python setup.py install

When you're done, GoogleCl will be installed on your computer. The first time you use it for a service, it will prompt you for your Google username. Type it in and hit enter, after which it will give you a URL that you can copy and paste into your browser to grant GoogleCL access to your account. Once you've done so, go back to the Terminal and hit enter to complete the authorization. You'll have to go through this process for each Google service, but only the first time you use them.

You now have access to a number of different tasks in the aforementioned Google services that you can run in the Terminal or in shell scripts. You can post videos to YouTube, schedule new appointments in Google Calendar, create and edit Google Docs inside Terminal, export your Gmail contacts list, and more. For more information, check out Google's example scripts, as well as GoogleCL's manual page. Hit the link to read more and check out their page on Google Code, and share your favorite applications of these newfound commands in the comments!

View comments »