opensheet

A free, super simple, hosted API for getting Google Sheets as JSON.

Tutorial blog post: benborgers.com/posts/google-sheets-json

If you have questions: benborgers.com/contact

Documentation

This API returns a given Google Sheet’s rows as JSON data.

In order to use it:

1. The first row of your Google Sheet should be a header row (here’s an example).
2. Link sharing must be turned on so anyone with the link can view the Google Sheet.

The format for this API is:

https://opensheet.elk.sh/spreadsheet_id/sheet_name

For example:

https://opensheet.elk.sh/1o5t26He2DzTweYeleXOGiDjlU4Jkx896f95VUHVgS8U/Test+Sheet

You can also replace sheet_name with the sheet number (in the order that the tabs are arranged), if you don’t know the name. For example, to get the first sheet:

https://opensheet.elk.sh/1o5t26He2DzTweYeleXOGiDjlU4Jkx896f95VUHVgS8U/1

Take note that the first sheet in order is numbered 1, not 0.

Caching

Responses are cached for 30 seconds in order to improve performance and to avoid hitting Google Sheets’ rate limits, so it might take up to 30 seconds for fresh edits to show up in the API response.

Recent hosting changes

I’ve moved the hosted instance of opensheet through a couple providers:

• First Vercel, which ended up being too expensive.
• Then Railway, which ended up being a bit unreliable.
• Most recently, Cloudflare Workers!

Note that the base URL is now opensheet.elk.sh, not opensheet.vercel.app. opensheet.vercel.app will continue to redirect to the correct URL, but you should update your code to use opensheet.elk.sh to avoid the slight performance degradation that comes from needing to redirect.

Self-hosting

This section is only necessary if you want to fork opensheet and host your own instance of it. If you don’t want to deal with that, you’re welcome to use my hosted instance at opensheet.elk.sh.

opensheet is written as a Cloudflare Worker. It uses Cloudflare’s Cache API for caching, however note that the Cache API only works on custom domains (not *.workers.dev domains).

If you host opensheet in your own Cloudflare account or make a fork, you’ll need to get your own Google Sheets API key:

1. Go to the Google Cloud Console and create a new project from the top navigation bar.
2. Search for “Google Sheets API” and enable it.
3. Search for “Credentials” and create an API key. If you want, you can restrict it to only be able to access the Google Sheets API.
4. Run npm run add-env-variables and paste in the API key.

Local development

npm run dev

Deployment

npm run deploy

Troubleshooting

For some reason, I was getting the error Error: expected value at line 1 column 1 when running npm run dev. I fixed this by uncommenting the workers_dev line and commenting the route line in wrangler.toml.