Authentication from a server without a browser

[Peter Forth]

I am trying to download our adsense account's spend for our reporting system.  Since my tool is going to be running on a remotely hosted server and just accessing our single account, I initially I tried using a "service account".  This seems to have been a dead end.  That being said, it also doesn't seem appropriate to use a "web" or "installed" credential since these type of credentials require you to open up a url in a web browser... something that is not available if you are running on a remote server via ssh.  Surely you can't just hit the url from another computer with a different ip address?

My current reference for this can be found at: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tutorials/python-guide

I also notice that it spends a lot of code parsing command line parameters, but doesn't actually seem to pass any in.  What is the purpose of the command line parameter parsing.

[Dean Lukies (Adsense API Team)]

Hi Peter,

Service Accounts do not work with Adsense.

What you need to do is authenticate once, then store the returned token and reuse it for future calls.

Most of the examples ( https://developers.google.com/adsense/management/libraries ) do this (some may require a change depending on the language) - look for offline access

thanks,

Dean

[Peter Forth]

What if you are running the program on a remote server that does not have a gui or browser?  Can you authenticate once on a different machine (for example a developer machine) and copy the token to the machine with the server running-- or is the credential bound to the original authenticating machine's ip address?

Thanks,
Peter

[Dean Lukies (Adsense API Team)]

Hi Peter,

Can you authenticate once on a different machine (for example a developer machine) and copy the token to the machine with the server running

Yes; if you have no GUI or web service running on the machine, that will work.  The tokens are very long lived.

Thanks,

Dean