FUSE filesystem over Google Drive

google-drive-ocamlfuse is a FUSE filesystem for Google Drive, written in OCaml. It lets you mount your Google Drive on Linux.

Features (see what's new)

• Full read/write access to ordinary files and folders
• Read-only access to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides (exported to configurable formats)
• Multiple account support
• Duplicate file handling
• Access to trash (.Trash directory)
• Unix permissions and ownership
• Symbolic links
• Read-ahead buffers when streaming
• Accessing content shared with you (requires configuration)
• Team Drive Support
• Service Account Support
• OAuth2 for Devices Support
• Since version 0.8.0, the process is kept in foreground (breaking change)
• Since version 0.8.0, the new configuration file format is TOML (breaking change)

Resources

• Homepage
• Wiki: includes installation instructions, and more details about configuration, and authorization

Authorization

Please be sure to have a look at the authorization page, to understand how the authorization process works, and to discover all the available options.

Getting started

Installation

I've uploaded .deb packages for Ubuntu to my PPA. In order to to install it, use the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alessandro-strada/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install google-drive-ocamlfuse

New beta versions are available on this PPA. If you want to test them, use the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alessandro-strada/google-drive-ocamlfuse-beta
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install google-drive-ocamlfuse

For other installation options, please refer to the wiki.

How to build

Requirements

• OCaml >= 4.08.0
• dune >= 2.0.0
• fuse3 >= 3.10.0
• gapi-ocaml >= 0.4.9
• sqlite3-ocaml >= 1.6.1
• tiny_httpd >= 0.10
• otoml >= 1.0.1
• ounit >= 2.0.0

Configuration and installation

To build the executable, run

dune build @install

To install it, run (as root, if your user doesn't have enough privileges)

dune install

To uninstall anything that was previously installed, execute

dune uninstall

Usage

First, you must set up OAuth 2.0:

1. Activate the Google Drive API.
2. Create an OAuth client ID.
3. Choose Desktop as Application type.
4. Set the Name to anything you like.

This way you will get a Client ID and Client secret that you can use to access your Drive. To authorize google-drive-ocamlfuse, pass the client ID and the client secret on the command line, e.g.:

google-drive-ocamlfuse -id xxxxxxxxxx.apps.googleusercontent.com -secret XXX-YYY-ZZZ

This command will create the default application directory (~/.gdfuse/default), containing the configuration file config (see the wiki page for more details about configuration). And it will start a web browser to obtain authorization to access your Google Drive. This way, you can modify the default configuration before mounting the filesystem.

Then, you can choose a local directory to mount your Google Drive (e.g.: ~/GoogleDrive).

Create the mount point, if it doesn't exists:

mkdir ~/GoogleDrive

Then, you can mount the filesystem (append & to the command, if you want to run it in background):

google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/GoogleDrive &

If you have more than one account, you can run:

google-drive-ocamlfuse -label [label] ~/GoogleDrive &

Using label to distinguish different accounts. The program will use the directory ~/.gdfuse/[label] to host the configuration, the application state, and the file cache. No file is shared among different accounts, so you can have a different configuration for each one.

To unmount the filesystem, issue this command:

fusermount3 -u ~/GoogleDrive

On distributions that still provide the older helper name, use fusermount -u ~/GoogleDrive instead.

Troubleshooting

This application is still under testing, so there are probably bugs to discover and fix. To be extra sure, if you want, you can mount the filesystem in read-only mode, modifying the configuration (see the documentation), to avoid any write attempt to the server. Anyway, the rm command will simply trash your file, so you should always be able to rollback any changes. If you have problems, you can turn on debug logging:

google-drive-ocamlfuse -debug mountpoint

The process is always kept in foreground; -debug enables debug and verbose logging.

In ~/.gdfuse/default you can find curl.log that will track every request to the Google Drive API, and gdfuse.log that will log FUSE operations and cache management. If something goes wrong, you can try clearing the cache, with this command:

google-drive-ocamlfuse -cc

If something still doesn't work, try starting from scratch removing everything in ~/.gdfuse/default. In this case you will need to reauthorize the application.

Note that in order to reduce latency, cached metadata remains valid for 60 seconds by default (configurable). After it expires, the next normal resource operation checks the server for changes. So, if you make a change to your documents (server side), you won't see it immediately in the mounted filesystem. Filesystem-capacity queries such as df use the latest in-memory quota snapshot without contacting Drive; they may report stale values, or unlimited capacity before the first snapshot is available.

Note also that Google Documents will be exported read-only.

Support

If you have questions, suggestions or want to report a problem, you may want to open an issue on github.