Show HN: Turn a Google Spreadsheet into an API

[rubbingalcohol]

I've used Google Spreadsheet as an "API" before (manually, not using this wrapper), and it is definitely not made to be used as such. Under heavy load, it slows down or times out, and even under the best circumstances it's not exactly fast.

It's great in a pinch. My use-case was a spreadsheet that others in my organization wanted to edit, then we'd pull the data onto a web page and display nicely. It worked, but eventually we had to set up a secondary server to cache the spreadsheet result because pulling directly from Google in realtime was too unreliable.

[bobfunk]

One thing you can do to make this use-case work better is to combine the spreadsheet as API with a static site generator.

I made this very basic plugin for Jekyll:

https://github.com/netlify/jekyll-gdrive

That'll let you use a Google spreadsheet as a datasource and expose the data to your liquid templates.

Combine it with something like https://www.netlify.com that'll run the builds for you and let you trigger builds via webhooks, and you have a Google spreadsheet based publishing engine where the final sites are completely static and live straight on a CDN.

Used it for one site where we used the scripting options of Google spreadsheets to add a "Publish Now" image button to the sheet, so in the end user could edit the the sheet, and then press "Publish" to trigger a build+deploy.

If the users are already used to spredsheets, it can be a really handy little anti CMS :)

[disclaimer: I'm a founder of netlify]

[ForrestN]

Admittedly naive question: if the advantage of having Google Sheets store the data is that you can use the Sheets editor when you want to, could something like Sheetsu store the data separately, much faster, for the API, and then just sync any changes between the Google Spreadsheet and their data? So you could still access via Google when needed, but these problems don't matter?

[franciscop]

I made a node.js package that does exactly this, a local cache in json with few hooks for data modification, and you can control when to update it to avoid timeouts [1]

Then we used it as backens for a blog for my University team as we were already using Drive, being each entry a google docs document [2]

[1] https://github.com/franciscop/drive-db [2] http://www.makersupv.com/

[rafaquintanilha]

Thanks for sharing. It's clear this approach works for small datasets and if you want something more reliable under heavy load just go for a proper database. Might work well with prototypes though.

[michaelbuckbee]

I also implemented something like this very recently [1] and I would recommend building in caching from the start as I was consistently getting throttled by the Google API even in development (just live reloading the page as I styled it).

Secondly, while the load page and then load the data in as JS approach definitely works, I found that just pushing the data in as HTML on the server side was easier to cache and faster to load.

1 - https://gist.github.com/mbuckbee/0ad3bd150e705c769c50

This was sufficient to handle thousands of requests per hour with a page load time of less than 250ms

[tmarthal]

There are a bunch of 'fork-n-go' github jekyl sample applications that wrap a webpage with a Google Spreadsheet datasource.

Here is a sample (from a github employee) that I've used in the past. Source: https://github.com/jlord/hack-spots and live site: jlord.us/hack-spots/#info - not sure how they are caching the spreadsheet, but I've never seen it not perform (not sure about concurrent users or whatever though).

[fenomas]

I've been looking at workflows like this, but the problem is being completely cut off from editing or testing locally when offline.

That is, it would be great to keep my data in a google sheet and transform it into a static json file that lives in my app source, but then if I need to work offline, all I can do is edit the json and remember to reflect the changes into the sheet later.

I don't suppose anyone has found a workflow that solves this?

[RachelF]

We had a similar experience. Google started giving us "Sharing quota for this file has been exceeded" errors.

[staticvar]

Cloudstitch is another service that gives you a RESTful interface over a Google Sheet. http://www.cloudstitch.com/

I made a video showing how to send a Raspberry Pi's temperature sensor data to a Google Sheet using Cloudstitch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cqa9Zkm7pCU

[rememberlenny]

Cloudstitch is pretty neat for low-tech workers too. Reminds me of the same audience that Zapier targets. Great for marketing, report prep, etc.

[huskyr]

Google Spreadsheets is awesome as a quick and dirty CMS. I use it all the time at the newspaper i work for, in combination with Tabletop (https://github.com/jsoma/tabletop). Only thing i lack right now is some kind of library that could cache those sheets using Redis for speed.

[dangerscarf]

Flatware was built to be an S3 caching buddy for Tabletop, might prove useful for you: https://github.com/jsoma/flatware

[arcatek]

That's nice - I've recently made a small project to wrap Github's Gists around an open API[1] for the same use case - a small open database easily browseable -, but your project seems much more interesting - spreadsheets are a very interesting way to solve this. Good job.

[1] https://github.com/arcanis/gist-proxy-server

[michaeloblak]

Whoa, gists as a DB - that's a neat idea!

[TD-Linux]

I would really prefer something like this to be a local library or something, adding another remote service in between negatively affects security and reliability. Especially in this case where there is no HTTPS yet.

[michaeloblak]

Will do HTTPS.

[madisonmay]

Sort of related (but the other way around): https://www.blockspring.com/

[osullivj]

https://etrading.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/blockspring-sympho...

[michaeloblak]

Yes, Blockspring is really great software. I've one API endpoint (from Sheetsu) which is getting data via Blockspring.

[andybak]

1. How to get columns?

2. Your docs say: http://sheetsu.com/apis/12345/column/:column_name

Is ':' a documentation convention somewhere that I've not come across? I tried:

    http://sheetsu.com/apis/12345/column/:Email

    http://sheetsu.com/apis/12345/column/:email

until I realised it was just:

    http://sheetsu.com/apis/12345/column/Email

[codingminds]

':' is not that uncommon. E.g.: http://mojolicio.us/perldoc/Mojolicious/Guides/Routing#Stand...

[adamcanady]

This is typically the way it's done in Node.js's Express library: http://expressjs.com/api.html#req

[cdbattags]

the colon is meant to show/explain the following is a variable

[atmosx]

Would be nice you could get single 'row' too, by number like: '<url>/row/2'

[michaeloblak]

Yes, it's just /column/Email.

[vikingcaffiene]

Used this approach at a previous company and was amazed at first. Wondered why it wasn't more commonly used. A poor mans API! Whats not to like?? Then I found out why: when put under any kind of load it completely falls over and stops sending data at all. Also randomly would throw security/authentication errors that none of our devs noticed because it only happened on windows and older versions of OSX (we were a Linux shop). Its a fun and novel approach but should never be used in a production application that needs to scale.

[user1241320]

Cool. I used https://github.com/jlord/sheetsee for a little thing. These things can be very handy.

[prawks]

What is the advantage of using this service over hitting Google's RESTful Spreadsheet API directly?

https://developers.google.com/google-apps/spreadsheets

[michaeloblak]

It's easier.

[Confiks]

I recently hacked something together that's using Tabletop and React to render 'products' that can be entered into a 'database' using Google Forms:

http://jsbin.com/zaberiqami/1/edit?js,output

The top part of the code is separated from the bottom plumbing, and is sprinkled with comments in Dutch for my students to edit ('8th grade', Dutch 2VWO).

I actually used it more as an example and inspiration to talk about databases in general. The group is a mix of students from the previous year; by setting the bar high and encouraging them to change the parts they knew something about, I could gauge their individual skill level a bit. Pink product listings ensued. JSBin really is an awesome tool I couldn't do without.

[atmosx]

Great My blog[1] uses a static side generator called middleman[2] and I was looking for a way to share 'quotes' in the website's subtitle. This seems to be the best solution! I was about to write a simple Sinatra API to run in localhost, but that's a way better solution for my use case!

Thanks!

[1] http://www.convalesco.org/

[2] https://middlemanapp.com/

UPDATE: A good use case is to use the HTML form to store subscribe/notify-me emails for landing pages. I was about to build a YAML file or use SQLite3 to store emails via form, but this is so much more convenient.

[IIAOPSW]

Ah man, this is perfect! finally a way to get simple servers running with very little hassle.

One major feature I would like is the ability to specify cells for I/O. Eg in some sort of "my api" console I could say "/custom_api, {stuff:A5, things:A6}, B2". Then requests to GET /custom_api would plug in the key-value of "stuff" into A5 and "things" into A6 and then respond with whatever is in B2.

Once more useful features are up, the ability to disable parts of the API (eg dump the whole spreadsheet) would be necessary.

Obviously you wouldn't build a large app with this, but I could see many traditional businesses using it for more than just prototyping.

[osullivj]

You can do that with SpreadServe[1] now. Instead of Google docs it uses real Excel .xls spreadsheets and supports VBA and XLL addins. It turns your spreadsheets into async scriptable servers. There are Python & Java APIs.

[1] http://spreadserve.com

[julienmarie]

You can do that also with http://calcfusion.com ( disclaimer I work there ).

[michaeloblak]

Thanks for the ideas! I'll consider them.

[binoyxj]

Neat. Instantly converted my BTC price tracking spreadsheet [1] into an API [2]

1) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iUVXmC04KIU5K1Osb_4H...

2) http://sheetsu.com/apis/2aab25c7

[paulsnar]

Note: if you changed the first row to show the type of data that will follow, that API will be tons nicer to use.

[intrasight]

Google Spreadsheets already have a native REST API. I use it to feed the charts in http://pittsburghtoday.org/ The key to getting good performance is to not put too much data into the sheets. Low thousands of rows is not a problem.

[Poiesis]

Was this inspired by a Danielle Morrill tweet by any chance?

[michaeloblak]

Yes, it was. I've similar problem like she had. I started looking for some good solution. Didn't found anything, so I wrote it myself.

I twitted her, but no response from her. If you have contact with her and she still needs it, please let her now about Sheetsu.

[jmhuret]

Really great start! I could see this being very useful.

If you were to extend the functionality to include full CRUD on entities, I think I would start using it immediately on some proof of concept work.

For instance, being able to GET, PUT/PATCH, and DELETE by id (or per row) would be awesome.

Thanks again for the nice MVP work!

[michaeloblak]

Thanks! I'm planning to implement PUT and DELETE soon.

[kleebeesh]

I've used sheetrock (https://github.com/chriszarate/sheetrock) with good success in the past. But this definitely seems more refined.

[j_s]

Another discussion 6 months ago triggered by a Blockspring (SaaS tool) blogpost:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9258774

[speleding]

Nice way to bypass zapier.com for some simple stuff because they can get expensive quickly. I just started using it to store a log of supersaas.com appointments in a Google spreadsheet, works great.