"Error generating the Discovery document for this api" when trying to build a drive service, starting 2/14/2013
Question: I am intermittently getting this error when calling build on a drive service.
I am able to reproduce this with a simple program which has the JSON
credentials stored to a file.

    
    
    #!/usr/bin/python
    
    import httplib2
    import sys
    from apiclient.discovery import build
    from oauth2client.client import Credentials
    
    json_creds = open('creds.txt', 'r').read()
    creds = Credentials.new_from_json(json_creds)
    
    http = httplib2.Http()
    http = creds.authorize(http)
    
    try:
        drive_service = build('drive', 'v2', http=http)
    except Exception:
        sys.exit(-1)
    

When I run this in a loop, I am seeing a rather high number of errors, this
code in a loop fails 15-25% of the time for me.

    
    
    i=0; while [ $i -lt 100 ]; do python jsoncred.py || echo FAIL ; i=$(( $i + 1 )); done | grep FAIL | wc -l
    

Now when I take this same code, and just replace 'drive' by 'oauth2', the code
runs without problems

I have confirmed that the OAuth token that I am using is valid and have the
correct scopes:

"expires_in": 2258,

"scope": "<https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile>
<https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive>
<https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email>",

Looking at my app logs, this seems to have started 2/14/2013 1PM PST. I did
not push any new code, so I wonder if this a problem with the API. Is there a
bug in the API causing this ?


Answer: Google are seeing some reports of increased error rates for the discovery
document. Please just retry on 500 error for now, and you should be
successful.

One could argue that you should have retry logic for this call anyway, since
it is good practice, but the current levels are too high, so, sorry about
that.

_Update:_ this should now be fixed.

