Google OAuth token expiry and renewal

Google OAuth token expiry and renewal | Generated by AI

Home 2026.07

Question: What is the expiry date of the Google OAuth authorization used by ww gen-video upload, and can it be extended?

Answer:

From this log:

scope=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube
access_type=offline

you are using Google OAuth 2.0 with offline access.

There are two different expirations:

Access token
- Usually expires after about 1 hour.
- If your upload succeeded and then you wait half an hour, it is still valid.
- You normally do not extend this manually.
Refresh token
- This is what access_type=offline gives you.
- It can live for a long time (often months/years) and is used to obtain new access tokens automatically.
- It does not have a fixed “30 minutes” expiry.

So if your question is:

“After half an hour, can I continue uploading?”

Yes. Half an hour is nothing; the access token is likely still valid.

If your question is:

“Can I make the token last longer than 1 hour?”

No, not for the access token. The correct design is:

refresh_token
      |
      v
Google OAuth token endpoint
      |
      v
new access_token (1 hour)
      |
      v
YouTube Data API upload

Your CLI should store the refresh token securely and automatically refresh:

creds = Credentials(
    token=access_token,
    refresh_token=refresh_token,
    token_uri="https://oauth2.googleapis.com/token",
    client_id=CLIENT_ID,
    client_secret=CLIENT_SECRET,
    scopes=["https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube"],
)

if creds.expired:
    creds.refresh(Request())

For a personal CLI tool like ww, the normal workflow is:

first run:
    browser OAuth login
    save refresh token

future runs:
    no browser
    refresh automatically
    upload video

One more thing: if you see the earlier error:

Access blocked: ZhiweiTextToSpeech has not completed the Google verification process

that is unrelated to token lifetime. That was an OAuth consent screen / testing user issue. For a personal YouTube uploader, keep the app in Testing mode and add your Google account as a test user, or publish the OAuth app if you need other users to authorize.

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