drive

drive is a tiny program to pull or push Google Drive files. You need at least go1.2 installed in order to build the program.

drive was originally developed by Burcu Dogan while working on the Google Drive team.

However, she no longer has the time to work on it so I am it's new maintainer.

Installation

go get github.com/odeke-em/drive/cmd/drive

Use drive help for further reference.

$ drive init [path]
$ drive pull [-r -hidden -no-prompt path] # pulls from remote
$ drive pull [-r -no-prompt -export ext1,ext2,ext3 -export-dir <export-dir> path] # pulls from remote and exports Docs + Sheets to one of its export formats.
e.g:
$ drive pull [-r -no-prompt -export pdf,docx,rtf,html ReportII.txt] # pull ReportII.txt from
 remote and export it to pdf, docx, rtf and html.
$ drive pull [-r -no-prompt -export pdf,docx,rtf,html -export-dir ~/Desktop/exports ReportII.txt] # pull ReportII.txt from
 remote and export it to pdf, docx, rtf and html and save it in ~/Desktop/exports
    
$ drive push [-r -no-prompt path] # pushes to the remote
$ drive push [-r -hidden path] # pushes also hidden directories and paths to the remote
# To push from a location not within the drive:
$ drive push -m $LOCATION .
e.g
    `drive push -m /mnt/media`
$ drive diff [-r -hidden path] # outputs a diff of local and remote
$ drive pub [path] # publishes a file, outputs URL
$ drive unpub [path] # revokes public access to the file

# Note using the no-clobber option for push or pull ensures that only ADDITIONS are made
# any modifications or deletions are ignored and those files are safe.
$ drive pull -no-clobber
$ drive push -no-clobber

$ drive trash
$ drive untrash

Configuration

If you would like to use your own client ID/client secret pair with drive, set the GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_SECRET variables in your environment

Why another Google Drive client?

Background sync is not just hard, it's stupid. My technical and philosophical rants about why it is not worth to implement:

• Too racy. Data has been shared between your remote resource, local disk and sometimes in your sync daemon's in-memory struct. Any party could touch a file any time, hard to lock these actions. You end up working with multiple isolated copies of the same file and trying to determine which is the latest version and should be synced across different contexts.

• It requires great scheduling to perform best with your existing environmental constraints. On the other hand, file attributes has an impact on the sync strategy. Large files are blocking, you wouldn't like to sit on and wait for a VM image to get synced before you start to work on a tiny text file.

• It needs to read your mind to understand your priorities. Which file you need most? It needs to read your mind to foresee your future actions. I'm editing a file, and saving the changes time to time. Why not to wait until I feel confident enough to commit the changes to the remote resource?

drive is not a sync deamon, it provides:

• Upstreaming and downstreaming. Unlike a sync command, we provide pull and push actions. User has opportunity to decide what to do with their local copy and when. Do some changes, either push it to remote or revert it to the remote version. Perform these actions with user prompt.

    $ echo "hello" > hello.txt
    $ drive push # pushes hello.txt to Google Drive
    $ echo "more text" >> hello.txt
    $ drive pull # overwrites the local changes with the remote version
  

• Allowing to work with a specific file or directory, optionally not recursively. If you recently uploaded a large VM image to Google Drive, yet only a few text files are required for you to work, simply only push/pull the file you want to work with.

    $ echo "hello" > hello.txt
    $ drive push hello.txt # pushes only the specified file
    $ drive pull path/to/a/b # pulls the remote directory recursively
  

• Better I/O scheduling. One of the major goals is to provide better scheduling to improve upload/download times.

• Possibility to support multiple accounts. Pull from or push to multiple Google Drive remotes. Possibility to support multiple backends. Why not to push to Dropbox or Box as well?

Notes:

• Google Docs cannot be directly downloaded but only exported to different forms e.g docx, xlsx, csv etc. When doing a pull remember to include option -export ext1,ext2,ext3 where ext1, ext2, ... could be:
  • doc, docx
  • jpeg, jpg
  • gif
  • html
  • odt
  • rtf
  • pdf
  • png
  • ppt, pptx
  • svg
  • txt, text
  • xls, xlsx

The exported files will be placed in a directory in the same path as the source Doc but affixed with '_exports' e.g drive pull -export gif,jpg,svg logo if successful will create a directory logo_exports which will look like: |- logo_exports |- logo.gif |- logo.png |- logo.svg

Known issues

• Probably, it doesn't work on Windows.
• Google Drive allows a directory to contain files/directories with the same name. Client doesn't handle these cases yet. We don't recommend you to use drive if you have such files/directories to avoid data loss.
• Racing conditions occur if remote is being modified while we're trying to update the file. Google Drive provides resource versioning with ETags, use Etags to avoid racy cases.

Sample Walk-through starting from installation.

System pre-requisites:

• An installation of Go with version >= 1.2

  To check your go version:

  $> go version

• Your gopath should have been set in your e.g

  Sample set up:

  vi ~/.bashrc or vi ~/.bash_profile

  export GOPATH=~/gopath

  export PATH=$GOPATH:$GOPATH/bin:${PATH}

Installing drive, the program:

$> go get github.com/odeke-em/drive/cmd/drive

Note: Running go install or go get github.com/odeke-em/drive will not create an executable.

Initializing a drive:

To setup/mount your Google Drive directory to path ~/GDRIVE

Pull:

• What does a pull operation do?

A pull operation gets the manifest of content from your Google drive and tries to mirror the Google Drive's

content to your drive. This will entail downloading content from the cloud as well as deleting content that

is present on your local drive folder but not on your Google Drive.

• How is a pull operation performed?

** Performing a pull with no arguments will pull all the respective content in from the current path

** You can also pull from a specific path

• Can I export documents?

Yes, by default Google Docs + Sheets cannot be downloaded raw but only exported. To export

your documents pass in: -export and a list of desired exports e.g:

• After creating a new document:

• Now the exported pull:

Push:

• What does "push" do?

  push uploads/updates content to your Google Drive mirroring its directory structure locally.

• How is a push operation performed?

  

Publish "pub"

• What does pub do?

"pub" publishes a file globally so that anyone with a link to it can read the file.

• How do I publish a file?

• What happens if I publish a file that doesn't yet exist on the my Google Drive?

Unpublish "unpub"

• What does unpub do?

  "unpub" revokes public read access to a file.

• How do I unpublish a file?

Trashing and Untrashing files

• How do I trash/untrash a file on the cloud?

  The options here are:

  1. Using your browser login to Google Drive and delete that file.

     • The next pull that you do should clean up that file off your disk.

  2. Using your terminal, take that file out of its position and then perform a push on only that file.

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LICENSE

Copyright 2013 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.