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How to Use Google Spreadsheet as a Backend for Your App
Sometimes a spreadsheet can stand in as a lightweight database. Here’s how to do it
If you have a simple app and you don’t need a very complex backend, you can use a Google spreadsheet to store your data. What is a database in our backends? It’s a table, and Google spreadsheets are also tables. Let’s see how we can use these tables as a backend for our apps.
Init
Let’s start working with setting up Google API credentials because we are going to need them to transfer data between front and backends.
Obviously, we will need a Google developers account. You can go here and create one, it’s free.
Next, let’s create a new project:
After we create a new project, let’s go and generate credentials for the project — API keys that we are going to need to access Google services. If you would like only read tables, you could generate only API keys and it would be enough. But we want to perform all CRUD and to do that we will need a service account.
Just give a new service account a name and skip roles and user access to this account. Now we have a service account. Let’s open it and generate a key for it.
