Google Contacts Sync

Sync the contacts of a bunch of google accounts using the People API.

Groups are not synced, just individual contacts.

Setup

1. Create a Google Cloud Platform project and enable the people API.

2. Create and download credentials

3. Install software

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt
   

4. Run the sync script

   python sync.py -v
   

   it will create a default config file that you will need to edit. The name of the config file will be displayed so you know what to edit (on my system it is ~/.local/share/google-contacts-sync/config.ini).

5. Edit the config file. You should have a stanza for each of your accounts, this example is for three email addresses: [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected]. It will look like this:

   [DEFAULT]
   last = 2021-07-02T09:44:37.906846+00:00
   
   [account-myemail]
   user = [email protected]
   keyfile = /blah/.local/share/google-contacts-sync/myemail_keyfile.json
   credfile = /blah/.local/share/google-contacts-sync/myemail_token
   
   [account-otheremail]
   user = [email protected]
   keyfile = /blah/.local/share/google-contacts-sync/otheremail_keyfile.json
   credfile = /blah/.local/share/google-contacts-sync/otheremail_token
   
   [account-anotheraccount]
   user = [email protected]
   keyfile = /blah/.local/share/google-contacts-sync/anotheraccount_keyfile.json
   credfile = /blah/.local/share/google-contacts-sync/anotheraccount_token
   

   You don't need to edit the last, that gets updated when the script runs. The main thing to set up is the keyfiles. These need to point to the credentials you downloaded. The credfile is the cached token that the script makes.

6. The script needs to store the credfile tokens (unless you have them from a previous syncer and just copy them in). Run the script, a browser will be opened up for you to login as each of your accounts in turn and accept the access. You will have to click the Advanced link to say you really trust this program.

7. Now you are ready to do syncing. If you have previously used a google contacts syncer that uses the csync-uid field (such as Michael Adlers) then you are good to go and can just start running the sync.py periodically. However if this is the first time doing syncing then you will have to initialize things. This is where contacts a matched up using their names. Just run

   python sync.py -v --init
   

   and let it run. It will take ages, but will give you updates. After this every contact will have a csync-uid field, unique across all your accounts. So you can change peoples names if you want and syncing will just work because the csync-uid is used to identify people. If you ever add another account you will have to run the --init again.