Google drive authentication?

[Geoff Canyon]

Has anyone downloaded files from google
drive<https://developers.google.com/drive/about-auth>?
More to the point, what's the correct method to retrieve and maintain/use
an authorization token?

I've run into this issue several times: with google drive, with making
requests to jira, etc., and always come up confused with how to handle
authentication unless I can put ?user=gcanyon&password=12341234 at the end
of my URLs