google-drive-ocamlfuse

FUSE filesystem over Google Drive

RAW Doc

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](https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse/wiki/What%27s-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:

text
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:

text
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

Configuration and installation

To build the executable, run

text
dune build @install

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

text
dune install

To uninstall anything that was previously installed, execute

text
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.:

text
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:

text
mkdir ~/GoogleDrive

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

text
google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/GoogleDrive &

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

text
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:

text
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:

text
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:

text
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.