The Google Workspace CLI is a unified command-line tool written in Rust that provides access to Google Workspace services including Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, Docs, Chat, and Admin APIs through a single interface. Rather than maintaining a static list of commands, the tool dynamically builds its entire command surface at runtime by reading from Google's Discovery Service, which means it automatically picks up new API endpoints and methods as Google adds them without requiring updates to the tool itself.
The project is designed to serve two distinct audiences. For human users, it eliminates the need to write curl calls against REST documentation by providing built-in help on every resource, a dry-run mode to preview requests before execution, and automatic pagination handling. For AI agents, every response is structured as JSON, and the tool includes over 40 agent skills that allow language models to manage Google Workspace without requiring custom tooling. The repository is classified across multiple domains including Google Workspace, command-line tools, automation, scripting, cloud services, administration, productivity, API interaction, and enterprise tooling.
Installation is flexible, with pre-built binaries available for download from GitHub Releases for multiple operating systems and architectures. Users can also install via npm, build from source, use a Nix flake, or install via Homebrew on macOS and Linux. The tool requires Node.js 18 or higher for npm installation, a Google Cloud project for OAuth credentials, and a Google account with access to Google Workspace.
Authentication supports multiple workflows to accommodate different environments. Users can authenticate interactively using the gws auth setup command if they have gcloud installed, manually set up OAuth through the Google Cloud Console, use pre-obtained access tokens, or configure service account credentials for server-to-server authentication. Credentials are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM with keys stored in the OS keyring or a configuration file. The tool also supports headless and CI environments through credential export and import mechanisms.
The repository shows active development with a median issue and pull request response latency of 2.3 hours and a mean latency of 36.5 hours across 244 tracked items. The most active issue labels are authentication-related with 20 tracked items, followed by model context protocol support with 5 items and distribution with 4 items. The primary contributor jpoehnelt has logged 302 events, with additional contributors Manamama and jadbox showing 9 and 8 events respectively. The project shares overlapping contributors with other repositories including denoland/deno, anthropics/claude-code, and google-gemini/gemini-cli.
The tool includes over 100 agent skills covering every supported API plus higher-level helpers for common workflows and 50 curated recipes for Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar, and Sheets. Helper commands are prefixed with a plus sign to distinguish them visually from auto-generated Discovery methods. Time-aware helpers like agenda, standup-report, weekly-digest, and meeting-prep automatically use the user's Google account timezone fetched from Calendar Settings API and cached for 24 hours.
Advanced features include support for multipart uploads, configurable pagination with flags for auto-pagination, page limits, and delays between pages, and integration with the Gemini CLI through an extension that gives agents direct access to all gws commands and Google Workspace skills. The project explicitly notes it is not an officially supported Google product and is under active development with breaking changes expected as it progresses toward version 1.0.
