403 "Not Authorized to access this resource/api" with directory.groups.list in APIs Explorer

[Ben Thompson]

Just as the title says. When I send a request like this in the APIs Explorer:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/admin/directory/v1/groups?domain={DOMAIN}&key={YOUR_API_KEY}

And this is the response I get:

{
 "error": {
  "errors": [
   {
    "domain": "global",
    "reason": "forbidden",
    "message": "Not Authorized to access this resource/api"
   }
  ],
  "code": 403,
  "message": "Not Authorized to access this resource/api"
 }
}

I am using our real domain and not literally {DOMAIN}. Am I missing something?

Ultimately my goal is to use the API to add and modify Google Groups but I thought merely listing them would be a simple place to start to make sure I was on the right track.

[John Boswell]

There seem to be a lot of helpful StackOverflow results that come up when you Google this issue. https://www.google.com/search?q=directory.group.list%20"not%20authorized%20to%20access%20this%20resource%2Fapi"

[Ben Thompson]

Thanks John. I'd been searching all over and somehow managed to miss this. It looks like what I was missing is a super-admin account's email address.

[Yiran Mao]

Hey Ben,

I know this is kind of a old post, but I am encountering the same problem as you. Neither the API explorer nor my app works when try to access Directory Admin API. 

I have go through the suggestions in stackoverflow, like "Delegate domain-wide authority to your service account". However, I wonder if you succeed doing that? The first link within that guide give me a broken web page that barely read and more importantly, those options mentioned in the guide are not there at all. 

I am pretty frustrating since it is very unclear what should I do now and if I need to abandon using this API.

Hope you can help me gather my thought about what is going on with this API. Much thanks in advance!

[Yiran Mao]

Never mind :)

I found out that I need to be domain administrator in order to use any Admin APIs, which apparently is not applicable in my case.