GoogleCL is a command-line client to Google services that was released recently. It should appeal to Web geeks, many of whom, in my non-scientific observation, are Mac users.

GoogleCL documentation suggest you use MacPorts to install it on Mac.

Now, I have to admit - it really pisses me off when people talk about installing simple Unix utilities on Mac using MacPorts (or Fink or that new kid on the block called HomeBrew). People, Mac OS-X 10.5 and up is a POSIX Unix system! If you have Dev Tools installed, and Terminal does not scare you, you should not need a crappy thing like MacPorts to install a simple unix utility like Git, SVN or GoogleCL. If you can not install them as you would install on most Unix systems, MacPorts will probably fail you too, so no need to pile garbage on your shiny Mac.

If you don’t have DevTools installed on your Mac, stop calling yourself a Mac geek until you go to http://developer.apple.com/, download and install Dev Tools.

The pre-requisites to GoogleCL are Python 2.5+ and Gdata Python Client Library. OS-X versions 10.5 and 10.6 have proper Python version pre-installed. Installaltion of the rest is as easy as:

mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
curl -O http://gdata-python-client.googlecode.com/files/gdata-2.0.10.tar.gz
tar xzvf gdata-2.0.10.tar.gz
cd gdata-2.0.10
sudo python setup.py install

curl -O http://googlecl.googlecode.com/files/googlecl-0.9.5.tar.gz
tar xzvf googlecl-0.9.5.tar.gz
cd googlecl-0.9.5
sudo python setup.py install

(The versions of GData and GoogleCL in the example are the latest current versions, if you find this blog post months from the date it was written on, make sure you download the latest and not outdated versions. The steps should still be the same).

After which you can run google shell with the command:\

google

To make sure you are properly set up run:\

youtube list

GoogleCL will give you instructions for logging into your account and if you have ever uploaded any videos to YouTube (has not everybody?) it will list those for you.

Enjoy.