The Google API Client library allows you to work with Google APIs such as Analytics, Adsense, Google+, Calendar, Drive or Games easily from your application. Recent versions of the client library include support for HTTP streams, which makes it simple to use the library from an App Engine application just by tweaking the configuration file.

Follow these steps to get the client library up and running.

1. Download the latest release package of the client.
2. Extract the library from the archive and copy the google-api-php-client directory to your project root.
3. Edit the file google-api-php-client/src/config.php, and configure the client to use HTTP streams and memcache by making the following changes to the $apiConfig array.

       // Which Authentication, Storage and HTTP IO classes to use.
       'authClass'    => 'Google_OAuth2',
       'ioClass'      => 'Google_HttpStreamIO',
       'cacheClass'   => 'Google_MemcacheCache',
   
       // We need to configure fake values for memcache to work
       'ioMemCacheCache_host' => 'does_not_matter',
       'ioMemCacheCache_port' => '37337',
   

4. Test that the client is working correctly by following the Google Plus example on the client home page.

Note that to use the API client from your application, you’ll need to follow the instructions for using OAuth 2.0 with your application.

In a follow-up post we’ll show you how to use the Google API client to access the Google Cloud Datastore from your application.