Connect Streamlit to a public Google Sheet

Introduction

This guide explains how to securely access a public Google Sheet from Streamlit Community Cloud. It uses the pandas library and Streamlit's secrets management.

This method requires you to enable link sharing for your Google Sheet. While the sharing link will not appear in your code (and actually acts as sort of a password!), someone with the link can get all the data in the Sheet. If you don't want this, follow the (more complicated) guide Connect Streamlit to a private Google Sheet.

Create a Google Sheet and turn on link sharing

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Note

If you already have a Sheet that you want to access, feel free to skip to the next step.

Add the Sheets URL to your local app secrets

Your local Streamlit app will read secrets from a file .streamlit/secrets.toml in your app's root directory. Create this file if it doesn't exist yet and add the share link of your Google Sheet to it as shown below:

# .streamlit/secrets.toml

public_gsheets_url = "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/xxxxxxx/edit#gid=0"

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Important

Add this file to .gitignore and don't commit it to your GitHub repo!

Copy your app secrets to the cloud

As the secrets.toml file above is not committed to GitHub, you need to pass its content to your deployed app (on Streamlit Community Cloud) separately. Go to the app dashboard and in the app's dropdown menu, click on Edit Secrets. Copy the content of secrets.toml into the text area. More information is available at Secrets Management.

Write your Streamlit app

Copy the code below to your Streamlit app and run it.

# streamlit_app.py

import pandas as pd
import streamlit as st

# Read in data from the Google Sheet.
# Uses st.cache_data to only rerun when the query changes or after 10 min.
@st.cache_data(ttl=600)
def load_data(sheets_url):
    csv_url = sheets_url.replace("/edit#gid=", "/export?format=csv&gid=")
    return pd.read_csv(csv_url)

df = load_data(st.secrets["public_gsheets_url"])

# Print results.
for row in df.itertuples():
    st.write(f"{row.name} has a :{row.pet}:")

See st.cache_data above? Without it, Streamlit would run the query every time the app reruns (e.g. on a widget interaction). With st.cache_data, it only runs when the query changes or after 10 minutes (that's what ttl is for). Watch out: If your database updates more frequently, you should adapt ttl or remove caching so viewers always see the latest data. Learn more in Caching.

If everything worked out (and you used the example table we created above), your app should look like this:

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