drive_auth() function not creating gargle-oauth token on password submission

R v3.6.2

RStudio Desktop v1.2.5033

R package 'googledrive' v1.0.0

I have written an R script that uploads csv files to a googlesheets account. In order to avoid having to automate this, I have used the drive_auth() function to refresh the OAuth token. Code is simply:

drive_auth(
 email = "email@gmail.com",
 path = NULL,
 scopes = "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive",
 cache = gargle::gargle_oauth_cache(),
 use_oob = gargle::gargle_oob_default(),
 token = NULL
)

drive_upload(file, overwrite=TRUE, type="spreadsheet")

On both a mac and a Windows OS machine, this then opens a default browser that asks for login details. When these are correctly entered, the script now has permissions to upload / edit files and googledrive functions subsequently work. It creates an authority token in the file path:

Home/Users/.R/garle/gargle-oauth

However, when attempting to do this on a new laptop that will be used as a server, I am met with the following error messages:

Error: can't get Google credentials.
Are you running googlesheets in a non-interactive session? Consider:
* sheets_deauth() to prevent the attempt to get credentials.
* call 'sheets_auth()' directly with all necessary specifics.

On inspection of the gargle-oauth folder, it has not created an OAuth token, as it did automatically with other machines on the entering of google login details.

I re-ran the programme on the other windows machine after deleting the OAuth token and it worked fine, creating the token again from scratch. I cannot pinpoint the reason why this token is not being created in this instance.

I've since solved this and I'm going to post an answer in case anyone is in a similar problem and comes across this post during a google search.

When initialising a connection with googledrive, the package uses the default port of 1410. It was unable to establish a connection with google because a zombie process was using this port.

To kill this process, open up the windows command prompt (or command line on a mac) as admin and enter the netstat command:

C:\Users>netstat -ano|findstr "PID :1410"

This will (if anything is running on this port) return:

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State PID
TCP 0.0.0.0:1410.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 18264

That number at the bottom right is the process PID, enter that into the following command to kill the process:

taskkill /pid 18264 /f

When running any R googledrive functions, you should now be able to authorise your code to interact with your google account and it will create an OAuth token to save you having to go through this again.

I confirm that this problem also got me on Ubuntu. I resolved it by finding and killing the process on port 1410 (which was also listening on 40167):

me@me:/internal$ netstat -tulpn
(Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info
 will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.)
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State       
PID/Program name
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.53:53           0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:3000            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      894/node
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:5432          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:25              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:443             0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:1410          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      21011/R
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:40197         0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      21011/R
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:9000          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:6379          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      -
tcp6       0      0 :::22                   :::*                    LISTEN      -
tcp6       0      0 :::25                   :::*                    LISTEN      -
tcp6       0      0 :::443                  :::*                    LISTEN      -
tcp6       0      0 :::1917                 :::*                    LISTEN      1277/node /home/ult
tcp6       0      0 :::3838                 :::*                    LISTEN      -
tcp6       0      0 ::1:6379                :::*                    LISTEN      -
tcp6       0      0 :::80                   :::*                    LISTEN      -
udp        0      0 127.0.0.53:53           0.0.0.0:*                           -

me@me:/internal$ kill -HUP 21011