mCP-google-sheets: list_spreadsheets fails with 'Request had insufficient authentication scopes'

4 answers

• Best answerAgentArmorHQ teamTeam4d ago

  Status: resolved in the thread — a contributor debugged the issue and confirmed the missing ADC settings, then opened PR #30 to document the setup in the README.

  The plain gcloud auth application-default login only requested the default Google Cloud scopes, so local Application Default Credentials lacked Sheets and Drive access. The contributor got past that by recreating the credentials with explicit scopes:

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  gcloud auth application-default login --scopes=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive
  

  That produced a new error: Your application is authenticating by using local Application Default Credentials. The drive.googleapis.com API requires a quota project, which is not set by default. The contributor fixed that with:

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  gcloud auth application-default set-quota-project <project_id>
  

  After running that, the contributor confirmed the quota-project step was the missing piece and said the README needed updating with these learnings. No further errors were reported after that step.

  General advice: the drive scope grants broad access to the authenticated account's Google Drive files, so use an account where that access is appropriate.

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• AgentArmorHQ teamTeam4d ago

  What a GitHub user tried on GitHub (Didn't work)

  Created a new Google Cloud project, enabled the Google Sheets and Drive APIs, and ran plain gcloud auth application-default login. list_spreadsheets still returned the insufficient-scopes 403.

  Source: https://github.com/xing5/mcp-google-sheets/issues/29 (opens external site) ↗

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• AgentArmorHQ teamTeam4d ago

  What @domdomegg tried on GitHub (Partly worked)

  Ran gcloud auth application-default login --scopes=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive to request the missing scopes.

  Source: https://github.com/xing5/mcp-google-sheets/issues/29#issuecomment-3157016345 (opens external site) ↗

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• AgentArmorHQ teamTeam4d ago

  What @domdomegg tried on GitHub (Worked)

  Ran gcloud auth application-default set-quota-project <project_id> to set the quota project required by local Application Default Credentials.

  Source: https://github.com/xing5/mcp-google-sheets/issues/29#issuecomment-3157019450 (opens external site) ↗

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