google-drive-ocamlfuse is a FUSE-based file system written in Ocaml, which makes it possible to mount Google Drive on Linux Systems.
Features
- Gives full read/write access to ordinary files/folders.
- Provides read-only access to Google Docs, sheets and slides.
- Access to Trash (.trash) Directory.
- Duplicate file handling.
- Support for multiple accounts.
Installation of google-drive-ocamlfuse on Linux
1. Google-drive-ocamlfuse tool can be easily installed on Ubuntu 15.04, 14.10, 14.04, etc. and it’s derivatives by adding a PPA repository.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alessandro-strada/ppa $ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install google-drive-ocamlfuse
On Archlinux, you can easily install google-drive-ocamlfuse from the AUR package.
$ yaourt -S google-drive-ocamlfuse
For most of other Linux distributions, you have to compile it from source using following commands.
2. If you are running a different Linux distribution, you must compile it from source, for this you must have OPAM (an OCaml package manager) installed on the system.
$ sudo apt-get install ocaml camlp4-extra
Note: If the above process reports that OPAM could not be installed, as it is not provided by any package for your distribution, you have to compile and install it using following commands.
$ git clone https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam.git $ cd opam $ ./configure $ make $ sudo make install
3. Next install the C tools and libraries: m4, curl, fuse, and sqlite3. These dependencies packages are must installed on the system, in order to compile the executable. If you are using a .deb based distribution, you can easily install these libraries using following command.
$ sudo apt-get install m4 libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfuse-dev libsqlite3-dev
4. Once all above needed dependencies are installed, start and update the OPAM.
$ opam init $ opam update
5. Now it’s time to install google-drive-ocamlfuse.
$ opam install google-drive-ocamlfuse
Usage of Google-drive-ocamlfuse
6. Firstly, you need to authorize google-drive-ocamlfuse with your Google account by running following command.
$ google-drive-ocamlfuse
As soon as you fire the above command, a page will open in default web browser and it will ask you to authorize and allow google-drive-ocamlfuse to access your Google Drive with your Google account. Enter your Email and Password.
7. Once you logged into your Google account, you need to accept the term and services.
8. You are asked to enter your Password once again.
9. Allow and give permission to application gdfuse OAuth2 to access your Google account.
I guess this article is pretty old now, but I tried it today and, after installing lots of additional packages on my Debian machine, I got it working. As noted, it’s pretty slow. Also, $USERNAME didn’t seem to exist but maybe this is just shorthand for inserting the real username of the google drive being mounted?
There is something strange about the way your code blocks are displaying; ~ is changed to – in my browser (Firefox)
Does anyone know how this method compares to eg grive/grive2? The latter methods, I’ve had bad experiences with, so I’ll try this new method now, thanks a lot for the article…
It is too slow. See my comment on March 28, 2016.
Is it possible to edit this to use lynx instead of “xdg-open”, “firefox” or “google-chrome”. Been following this to install on one of my headless servers which has no gui and therefore no graphical browser.
@Rob,
Not possible, better install GUI on Linux server to use Firefox or Chrome browser..
Only a Microsoft Windows Server administrator would think a GUI on a GNU/Linux server is a good idea. There are terminal file managers available for GNU/Linux; try integrating one or more of them with google-drive.
Was thinking the same thing, this might help you found this on the official github site.
Haven’t tried it myself, but it seems it is possible with a few work arounds or different steps.
https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse/wiki/Headless-Usage-&-Authorization
When I try to give ownership to avi, it says “user is not found” .Any idea?
@Lim,
That’s an example user “Avi” used in the article, you should replace that user name with yours..
This caused Linux Mint to stop booting!
Thanks a lot folks, very useful, even if I have no knowledge about Linux (sorry my English, I do not speak English).
Hi,
I have had to change:
gdfuse#default /mnt/gdrive fuse uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0
to:
gdfuse#default /mnt/google_drive fuse uid=1000,gid=1000,user 0 0
@Jacques,
Thanks for sharing the tip, but could you tell us why it needed and how you came to know? it will help us to correct the article with correct explanation. So, that end users will know more better about the command.
With the user options the user can mount and unmount the drive without the usage of sudo
Thank you very much for this tutorial. It is really very useful.
The question is what to do if you only have the command line and no GUI (so no browser too ;-).
Thank you.
google-drive-ocamlfuse on Lubuntu 14.04 is too slow. I tried to use vi to edit a text file in google-drive, when I pasted about 2KB text from clipboard, it took around 60 seconds. The same thing works smoothly on pCloud.com, it seems that pCloud do caching well.