FUSE filesystem over Google Drive

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

Features (see what’s new in version 0.6.x)

• 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

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 >= 3.12.0
• Findlib >= 1.2.7
• ocamlfuse >= 2.7.1
• gapi-ocaml >= 0.2.14
• sqlite3-ocaml >= 1.6.1

Configuration and installation

To build the executable, run

ocaml setup.ml -configure
ocaml setup.ml -build

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

ocaml setup.ml -install

To uninstall anything that was previously installed, execute

ocaml setup.ml -uninstall

Usage

The first time, you can run google-drive-ocamlfuse without parameters:

google-drive-ocamlfuse

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 will let you modify default configuration before mounting the filesystem.

Then you can mount the filesystem:

google-drive-ocamlfuse mountpoint

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

google-drive-ocamlfuse -label label [mountpoint]

Using label to distinguish different accounts. The program will use the directory ~/.gdfuse/label to host configuration, application state, and 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:

fusermount -u mountpoint

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

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, the application will query the server and check for changes only every 60 seconds (configurable). So, if you make a change to your documents (server side), you won’t see it immediately in the mounted filesystem.

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.