Spark gmail credential storage

When using Spark to interact with Gmail, you need to store your Gmail credentials securely. Here are a few options for credential storage:

  1. Environment Variables: You can store your Gmail credentials as environment variables on your machine. This is a simple and straightforward approach, but it's not recommended for production use as environment variables can be easily accessed by others.
  2. Properties File: You can store your Gmail credentials in a properties file, such as application.properties or credentials.properties. This file can be stored outside of your code repository and is a good option for production use.
  3. Secrets Manager: You can use a Secrets Manager service like Google Cloud Secret Manager, AWS Secrets Manager, or HashiCorp's Vault to store your Gmail credentials. These services provide secure storage and management of sensitive data.
  4. Spark Configuration: Spark provides a built-in configuration mechanism that allows you to store your Gmail credentials in a secure manner. You can use the spark.driver.extraJavaOptions property to set environment variables that are only accessible to the Spark driver.

Here's an example of how you can store your Gmail credentials using Spark configuration:

val spark = SparkSession.builder
 .appName("Gmail Example")
 .config("spark.driver.extraJavaOptions", "-Dgmail.username=myusername -Dgmail.password=mypassword")
 .getOrCreate()

In this example, the spark.driver.extraJavaOptions property is used to set environment variables gmail.username and gmail.password that are only accessible to the Spark driver.

  1. Credential Files: You can store your Gmail credentials in a credential file, such as a JSON or YAML file, and load it into your Spark application using a library like Apache Commons Configuration.

Regardless of the method you choose, it's essential to ensure that your Gmail credentials are stored securely and are not accidentally committed to your code repository.

Here's an example of how you can use the Properties class to load your Gmail credentials from a properties file:

val props = new Properties()
props.load(new FileInputStream("credentials.properties"))

val username = props.getProperty("gmail.username")
val password = props.getProperty("gmail.password")

In this example, the credentials.properties file contains the following contents:

gmail.username=myusername
gmail.password=mypassword

You can then use the username and password variables to authenticate with Gmail using the Spark Gmail API.