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Regenerating Google's ClientLogin AuthToken in Django

If your application makes use of Google API, you will most likely have to deal with AuthToken expiry (unless you use oAuth). As far as I know, AuthToken generated with ClientLogin authorization expires after 2 weeks. Therefore, it’s good to have a solution to auto regenerate it. First of all, create a model that stores the token and the last updated day.

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from django.db import models
from datetime import datetime, timedelta

class AuthToken(models.Model):
    token = models.TextField()
    last_updated = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)

    def token_update(self):
        # Check if the token's lifespan is more than n days (n=1 in this case)
        # You can adjust n value to whatever you want

        if datetime.now() - self.last_updated > timedelta(days=1):
            return True
        return False

Now let’s write a function that regenerates AuthToken and saves it back to database.

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from models import AuthToken

CLIENT_LOGIN_URL = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin'

def regenerate_authtoken():
    auth_token = AuthToken.objects.all()[0]
    if auth_token.token_update():
        data = urllib.urlencode(
            {
                'Email': 'youremail@gmail.com',
                'Passwd': 'yourpassword',
                'service': 'service_name',
                'accountType': 'GOOGLE'
            }
        )
        req = urllib2.Request(CLIENT_LOGIN_URL, data=data)
        resp = urllib2.urlopen(req)
        resp_body = resp.read()

        resp_dict = dict(
            x.split('=') for x in resp_body.split('\n') if x
        )
        auth_token.token = resp_dict['Auth']
        auth_token.save()

With this approach you would have to call regenerate_authtoken() every time you make API requests. Let me know if you have a better solution.

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