Announcing Google Ads API Doctor

We have heard from users that correctly configuring a client library and provisioning OAuth2 credentials can be challenging, so today we are introducing Google Ads API Doctor, a new tool that will analyze your client library environment. The program will:

• Verify that your OAuth2 credentials are correctly configured and ready to make API calls.
• Guide you through fixing any OAuth2 problems it detects and verify the corrected configuration.

The initial version of this tool will help you analyze and fix issues related to OAuth2 configuration, including the following common issues:

• Invalid refresh token: The program will identify this and guide you through the process to obtain a valid token, back up your configuration file, and write the new value to your active configuration file.
• Permission denied: There are several OAuth errors that sound similar, such as user permission denied and permission denied. The program identifies that in the first case it is caused by an invalid refresh token and in the second it’s because the Google Ads API is disabled in the Google API Console.

If you want to send the output to support, you can run your scenario with the PII flag to hide your Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and copy the screen output. To gather even more information, you can use the verbose flag to see the low-level JSON that is returned.

We are releasing this project as open source per Google’s open source initiative, and we encourage contributions. See contributing to Google open source to learn more about how to contribute to this project. As always, share your feedback on the Google Ads API forum.

Bob Hancock and Poki Chui, Google Ads API Team