drive

README

drive

drive is a tiny program to pull or push Google Drive files.

drive was originally developed by Burcu Dogan while working on the Google Drive team. This repository contains the latest version of the code, as she is no longer able to maintain it.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• Installation
  • Platform Packages
• Configuration
• Usage
  • Initializing
  • Pulling
    • Exporting Docs
  • Pushing
  • Publishing
  • Unpublishing
  • Sharing and Emailing
  • Unsharing
  • Touching
  • Trashing and Untrashing
  • Emptying the Trash
  • Deleting
  • Listing Files
  • Stating Files
  • Quota
  • Features
  • About
  • Help
  • Move
  • Rename
  • DriveIgnore
  • DesktopEntry
  • Command Aliases
• Revoking Account Access
• Uninstalling
• Applying patches
• Why another Google Drive client?
• Known issues
• Reach out
• Disclaimer
• LICENSE

Requirements

go 1.2 or higher is required. See here for installation instructions and platform installers.

Installation

To install from the latest source, run:

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

Otherwise:

• In order to address issue #138, where debug information should be bundled with the binary, you'll need to run:

$ go get github.com/odeke-em/drive/drive-gen && drive-gen

Platform Packages

For curated packages on your favorite platform, please see file Platform Packages.md.

Is your platform missing a package? Feel free to prepare / contribute an installation package and then submit a PR to add it in.

Configuration

Optionally set the GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_API_CLIENT_SECRET environment variables to use your own API keys.

Usage

Initializing

Before you can use drive, you need to mount your Google Drive directory on your local file system:

$ drive init ~/gdrive
$ cd ~/gdrive

Pulling

The pull command downloads data from Google Drive that does not exist locally, and deletes local data that is not present on Google Drive. Run it without any arguments to pull all of the files from the current path:

$ drive pull

Pulling by matches is also supported

$ cd ~/myDrive/content/2015
$ drive pull --matches vines docx

To force download from paths that otherwise would be marked with no-changes

$ drive pull -force

To pull specific files or directories, pass in one or more paths:

$ drive pull photos/img001.png docs

Note: Checksum verification:

* By default checksum-ing is turned off because it was deemed to be quite vigorous and unnecessary for most cases.
* Due to popular demand to cover the common case in which size + modTime differences are sufficient to detect file changes. The discussion stemmed from issue [#117](https://github.com/odeke-em/drive/issues/117).

To turn checksum verification back on:

```shell
$ drive pull -ignore-checksum=false
```

drive also supports piping pulled content to stdout which can be accomplished by:

$ drive pull -piped path1 path2

Exporting Docs

By default, the pull command will export Google Docs documents as PDF files. To specify other formats, use the -export option:

$ drive pull -export pdf,rtf,docx,txt

By default, the exported files will be placed in a new directory suffixed by _exports in the same path. To export the files to a different directory, use the -export-dir option:

$ drive pull -export pdf,rtf,docx,txt -export-dir ~/Desktop/exports

Supported formats:

• doc, docx
• jpeg, jpg
• gif
• html
• odt
• rtf
• pdf
• png
• ppt, pptx
• svg
• txt, text
• xls, xlsx

Pushing

The push command uploads data to Google Drive to mirror data stored locally.

Like pull, you can run it without any arguments to push all of the files from the current path, or you can pass in one or more paths to push specific files or directories.

Note: To ignore checksum verification during a push:

$ drive push -ignore-checksum

drive also supports pushing content piped from stdin which can be accomplished by:

$ drive push -piped path

• Note:

  • In relation to #107 and numerous other issues related to confusion about clashing paths, drive will abort on trying to deal with clashing names. To turn off this safety, pass in flag --ignore-name-clash.

  • In relation to #57 and @rakyll's #49. A couple of scenarios in which data was getting totally clobbered and unrecoverable, drive now tries to play it safe and warn you if your data could potentially be lost e.g during a to-disk clobber for which you have no backup. At least with a push you have the luxury of untrashing content. To disable this safety, run drive with flag -ignore-conflict e.g:

    $ drive pull -ignore-conflict collaboration_documents
    

    Playing the safety card even more, if you want to get changes that are non clobberable ie only additions run drive with flag -no-clobber e.g:

    $ drive pull -no-clobber Makefile
    

  • Ordinarily your system will not traverse nested symlinks e.g:

    $ mkdir -p a/b
    $ mkdir -p ~/Desktop/z1/z2 && ls ~ > ~/Desktop/z1/z2/listing.txt
    $ ln -s ~/Desktop/z1/z2 a/b
    $ ls -R a # Should print only z2 and nothing inside it. 
  

  However in relation to #80, for purposes of consistency with your Drive, traversing symlinks has been added.

For safety with non clobberable changes i.e only additions:

$ drive push -no-clobber

• Due to the reasons above, drive should be able to warn you in case of total clobbers on data. To turn off this behaviour/safety, pass in the -ignore-conflict flag i.e:

$ drive push -force sure_of_content

To get Google Drive to convert a file to its native Google Docs format

$ drive push -convert

Extra features: to make Google Drive attempt Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for png, gif, pdf and jpg files.

$ drive push -ocr

Note: To use OCR, your account should have this feature. You can find out if your account has OCR allowed.

$ drive features

Note:

• MimeType inference is from the file's extension.

  If you would like to coerce a certain mimeType that you'd prefer to assert with Google Drive pushes, use flag -coerce-mime <short-key>

$ drive push -coerce-mime docx my_test_doc

• Excluding certain operations can be done both for pull and push by passing in flag --exclude-ops <csv_crud_values>

e.g

$ drive pull --exclude-ops "delete,update" vines
$ drive push --exclude-ops "create" sensitive_files

Publishing

The pub command publishes a file or directory globally so that anyone can view it on the web using the link returned.

$ drive pub photos

Unpublishing

The unpub command is the opposite of pub. It unpublishes a previously published file or directory.

$ drive unpub photos

Sharing and Emailing

The share command enables you to share a set of files with specific users and assign them specific roles as well as specific generic access to the files. It also allows for email notifications on share.

$ drive share -emails odeke@ualberta.ca,odeke.ex@gmail.com -message "This is the substring file I told you about" -role writer -type group mnt/substringfinder.c projects/kmp.c

For example to share a file with users of a mailing list and a custom message

$ drive share -emails drive-mailing-list@gmail.com -message "Here is the drive code" -role group mnt/drive

Unsharing

The unshare command revokes access of a specific accountType to a set of files.

$ drive unshare -type group mnt/drive

Touching

Files that exist remotely can be touched i.e their modification time updated to that on the remote server using the touch command:

$ drive touch Photos/img001.png logs/log9907.txt

For example to touch all files that begin with digits 0 to 9:

$ drive touch -matches $(seq 0 9)

Trashing and Untrashing

Files can be trashed using the trash command:

$ drive trash Demo

To trash files that contain a prefix match e.g all files that begin with Untitled, or Make

Note: This option uses the current working directory as the parent that the paths belong to.

$ drive trash -matches Untitled Make

Files that have been trashed can be restored using the untrash command:

$ drive untrash Demo

To untrash files that match a certain prefix pattern

$ drive untrash -matches pQueue photos Untitled

Emptying the Trash

Emptying the trash will permanently delete all trashed files. They will be unrecoverable using untrash after running this command.

$ drive emptytrash

Deleting

Deleting items will PERMANENTLY remove the items from your drive. This operation is irreversible.

$ drive delete flux.mp4

$ drive delete --matches onyx swp

Listing Files

The list command shows a paginated list of paths on the cloud.

Run it without arguments to list all files in the current directory:

$ drive list

Pass in a directory path to list files in that directory:

$ drive list photos

To list matches

$ drive list --matches mp4 go

The -trashed option can be specified to show trashed files in the listing:

$ drive list -trashed photos

To get detailed information about the listings e.g owner information and the version number of all listed files:

$ drive list -owners -l -version

Stating Files

The stat commands show detailed file information for example people with whom it is shared, their roles and accountTypes, and fileId etc. It is useful to help determine whom and what you want to be set when performing share/unshare

$ drive stat mnt

By default stat won't recursively stat a directory, to enable recursive stating:

$ drive stat -r mnt

Quota

The quota command prints information about your drive, such as the account type, bytes used/free, and the total amount of storage available.

$ drive quota

Features

The features command provides information about the features present on the drive being queried and the request limit in queries per second

$ drive features

About

The about command provides information about the program as well as that about your Google Drive. Think of it as a hybrid between the features and quota commands.

$ drive about

OR for detailed information

$ drive about -features -quota

Help

Run the help command without any arguments to see information about the commands that are available:

$ drive help

Pass in the name of a command to get information about that specific command and the options that can be passed to it.

$ drive help push

To get help for all the commands

$ drive help all

Copying

drive allows you to copy content remotely without having to explicitly download and then reupload.

$ drive copy -r blobStore.py mnt flagging

$ drive copy blobStore.py blobStoreDuplicated.py

Rename

drive allows you to rename a file/folder remotely. To do so:

$ drive rename url_test url_test_results
$ drive rename openSrc/2015 2015-Contributions

Move

drive allows you to move content remotely between folders. To do so:

$ drive move photos/2015 angles library archives/storage

DriveIgnore

drive allows you to specify a '.driveignore' file similar to your .gitignore, in the root directory of the mounted drive. Blank lines and those prefixed by '#' are considered as comments and skipped.

For example:

$ cat << $ >> .driveignore
> # My drive ignore file
> \.gd$
> \.so$
> \.swp$
> $

Note: Pattern matching and suffixes are done by regular expression matching so make sure to use a valid regular expression suffix.

DesktopEntry

As previously mentioned, Google Docs, Drawings, Presentations, Sheets etc and all files affiliated with docs.google.com cannot be downloaded raw but only exported. Due to popular demand, Linux users desire the ability to have *.desktop files that enable the file to be opened appropriately by an external opener. Thus by default on Linux, drive will create *.desktop files for files that fall into this category.

Command Aliases

drive supports a few aliases to make usage familiar to the utilities in your shell e.g:

• cp : copy
• ls : list
• mv : move

Revoking Account Access

To revoke OAuth Access of drive to your account, when logged in with your Google account, go to https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions and revoke the desired permissions

Uninstalling

To remove drive from your computer, you'll need to take out:

• $GOPATH/bin/drive
• $GOPATH/src/github.com/odeke-em/drive
• $GOPATH/pkg/github.com/odeke-em/drive
• $GOPATH/pkg/github.com/odeke-em/drive.a

• Also do not forget to revoke drive's access in case you need to uninstall it.

Applying patches

To apply patches of code e.g in the midst of bug fixes, you'll just need a little bit of git fiddling.

For example to patch your code with that on remote branch patch-1, you'll need to go into the source code directory, fetch all content from the git remote, checkout the patch branch then run the go installation: something like this.

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/odeke-em/drive
$ git fetch --all
$ git checkout patch-1
$ git pull origin patch-1
$ go get github.com/odeke-em/drive/cmd/drive

Why another Google Drive client?

Background sync is not just hard, it is 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 daemon, 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?

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.

Reach out

Doing anything interesting with drive or want to share your favorite tips and tricks? Check out the wiki and feel free to reach out with ideas for features or requests.

Disclaimer

This project is not supported nor maintained by Google.

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.