[Quick Tips] :How to Mount Google Drive in LINUX

How to Mount Google Drive in LINUX

More than a year after Google has announced its file storage and synchronization service called Drive, there's still no official Linux client. There are some unofficial clients, but they're not perfect: Insync is not free, Grive is command line only and its development seems to have stopped and so on.

So here's another alternative for easily managing your Google Drive files under Linux: google-drive-ocamlfuse.

google-drive-ocamlfuse is a FUSE filesystem backend for Google Drive which you can use to mount your Google Drive under Linux.

Among its features are full read/write support for regular files and folders, multiple account support, duplicate file handling as well as access to the Google Drive trash directory. google-drive-ocamlfuse also provides read-only access to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, which its converts to ODT, ODS of PDF (this can be configured).

google-drive-ocamlfuse is still under testing so while it works pretty well, you may encounter bugs. For instance, in my test, some Google documents weren't converted for some reason.

It's also worth mentioning that the changes don't show up instantly - when you edit or upload a new file, it can take 60 seconds (this is configurable) until the changes show up in the mounted filesystem. If newly added files don't show up in your file manager, enter the folder again or refresh it (Ctrl + F).

Install google-drive-ocamlfuse in Ubuntu

Update: Google-drive-ocamlfuse is now available in a PPA. Add the PPA and install it in Ubuntu using the following commands:

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

Usage

Firstly, you need to authorize google-drive-ocamlfuse with Google. To do this, run the following command:

google-drive-ocamlfuse

This should open a tab in your default web browser, asking to allow google-drive-ocamlfuse to access your Google Drive. Click "Allow", wait a few seconds for google-drive-ocamlfuse to retrieve the authorization code and you're done.

Now let's mount Google Drive. Create a folder in your home directory, let's call it "gdrive":

mkdir ~/gdrive

And mount Goole Drive using the command below:

google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/gdrive

That's it. If you want to configure the interval between queries to detect server-side changes, the export format used for Google documents and so on, see the configuration file: ~/.gdfuse/default/config


To mount Google Drive on startup, add "google-drive-ocamlfuse /path/to/gdrive" (replacing "/path/to/ with the exact path to the folder where you want to mount Google Drive) to Startup Applications.

For more info, including using multiple accounts, see the google-drive-ocamlfuse wiki.