Team Collaboration

If your team keeps config data in spreadsheet files, you probably have felt this pain — how to share them, how to edit them. Teams usually try one of two things: putting the files on a shared drive, or adding a locking scheme. Both lead to the same bottleneck — only one person can edit the same file at a time, and everyone else has to wait, sometimes for hours.

The usual alternative is to keep the files in version control, which means each person works on a local copy. But version control treats a spreadsheet file as an opaque binary blob: it cannot show diffs or merge changes. When two copies diverge, someone has to resolve the conflicts by hand, line by line, cell by cell.

Google Sheets avoids both problems. Multiple people can edit the same sheet at the same time, and there is no merge step at all, because merges happen instantly and automatically. But there is a catch: its version history is hard to manage. You cannot pin a build to a snapshot of the sheets, as you would pin the build to a commit in your repository.

Archmage fills that gap. archmage drive download pulls the sheets down as spreadsheet files, so you can commit them to your repository. Finally, they fit into your normal version control workflow: you can switch between versions of them, mark a version for release, and build from it — just like any other file.

# Authorize with your Google Drive credentials file
archmage drive login --credentials ./google-drive-credentials.json

# See what is under a folder
archmage drive list --root https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AbCdEf

# Pull everything into ./configs
archmage drive download --root https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AbCdEf \
    -o ./configs

From Google Drive to Your Repository

download writes a drive.manifest file next to the spreadsheets it pulls, recording each file’s modification time, which means later downloads skip any file that has not changed.

Tip

Validate all config data before committing it — for example, run archmage export and confirm it succeeds — so a bad edit does not enter your repository and will not block other people’s work. Pick a validation step that works for your team.

Google Drive Access

Each team member runs archmage drive login with their own Google account, using a shared credentials file. What Archmage can see depends on the signed-in account’s permissions, so access is controlled by ordinary Google Drive sharing — Archmage does not add a separate permission system.

For team members, see the One-Time Sign-in Instructions. For Google Drive admins, see Setting Up Google Drive Access.