Installing Drivel

Requirements

Drivel is pure Go with no cgo, so a build needs nothing but the toolchain. The FUSE helper is a runtime requirement: the binary builds and runs without it and fails at mount time with exec: "fusermount3": executable file not found.

The FUSE helper

sudo apt install fuse3        # Debian, Ubuntu
sudo dnf install fuse3        # Fedora, RHEL
sudo pacman -S fuse3          # Arch

libfuse3-dev is headers only and is not what you need.

On macOS, install macFUSE . Drivel does not bundle it and will not install it for you; FUSE-T is not a substitute (see Platform support ).

On FreeBSD the module is in base but is not loaded by default:

kldload fusefs
sysctl vfs.usermount=1

Add fusefs_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf to make it persist.

Install the command — and at least one backend

Drivel is two kinds of program. drivel is the command: it mounts the filesystem, watches for changes, and keeps the local state. A backend is a separate executable that talks to one storage service — drivel-provider-gdrive for Google Drive, drivel-provider-sftp for an SFTP server — which drivel starts for you when a mount needs it.

They are separate on purpose. Nothing that goes wrong inside a backend can take your filesystem down: if it crashes, the mount stays up and Drivel starts it again. It also means you only install the backends you actually use.

You need at least one. A drivel with no backend installed can still mount a directory, but it has nothing to sync with.

go install github.com/syshlted/drivel/cmd/drivel@latest
go install github.com/syshlted/drivel/cmd/drivel-provider-gdrive@latest

Everything lands in $(go env GOBIN), or $(go env GOPATH)/bin if GOBIN is unset. Make sure that is on your PATH. Drivel looks for backends next to itself first, so installing them the same way is all it takes.

If you want SFTP as well:

go install github.com/syshlted/drivel/cmd/drivel-provider-sftp@latest

To see what Drivel can find:

drivel mount -h        # errors from a mount name the backends that are installed

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/syshlted/drivel
cd drivel
make build

make build produces bin/drivel and every backend beside it, which is what CI uses and produces a statically linked binary with no library dependencies — it runs on any Linux of the same architecture, whatever glibc that machine has. make help lists every target; contributors should read the developer build guide instead of this page.

If you are packaging Drivel for a distribution, build with make build CGO_ENABLED=1 instead. That links the system’s C library, so the package tracks your distribution’s patch level and its security updates arrive through your package manager rather than waiting on a Drivel release.

Cross-compiling works for every Linux architecture, darwin/amd64, darwin/arm64 and FreeBSD. Remember the backends:

GOOS=darwin GOARCH=arm64 go build ./cmd/drivel
GOOS=darwin GOARCH=arm64 go build ./cmd/drivel-provider-gdrive

Windows is not supported — see Platform support .

Installing system-wide

From a checkout, one target places everything:

sudo make install         # PREFIX=/usr/local  MANDIR=$PREFIX/share/man  SBINDIR=/sbin

The backends go under lib rather than bin because they are not commands you run: started from a shell, one prints a handshake line and exits. Drivel refuses to start a backend that is group- or world-writable, or one whose directory is, so install them as root and leave them 0755 — a backend runs with your credentials, and a file anyone could replace is a file anyone could replace with.

SBINDIR defaults to /sbin rather than to something under PREFIX because mount(8) searches /sbin and /usr/sbin only. Those two symlinks are what let a mount be an /etc/fstab line — see mounting from /etc/fstab . They are placed on every platform but only work on Linux.

sudo make uninstall removes exactly what this placed, and nothing else.

Shell completions

sudo make install places them, so if you installed that way there is nothing to do — start a new shell and drivel mount -<TAB> works.

If you installed some other way — a downloaded binary, go install, a copy you built — Drivel prints its own completion script, so there is no file to fetch from anywhere:

drivel completion bash
drivel completion zsh

To try it in the shell you are in right now:

eval "$(drivel completion bash)"

That works, but it runs Drivel every time a shell starts. For a permanent install, write the script to the place your shell already looks:

# bash — per-user
drivel completion bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/drivel

# bash — system-wide
drivel completion bash | sudo tee /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/drivel >/dev/null

# zsh — into a directory on your $fpath; the filename must be _drivel
mkdir -p ~/.zsh/completions
drivel completion zsh > ~/.zsh/completions/_drivel
autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

For zsh the file is the better route rather than merely the tidier one: _drivel is an autoloaded function file, so the eval form only works if it comes after compinit in your ~/.zshrc.

The script is generated from Drivel’s own flag definitions at the moment you run the command, so it knows every flag your binary does — including which take a directory and which take one of a fixed set of words. -drive-delete <TAB> offers trash and permanent.

Man page

man ./docs/user/drivel.1                          # read it in place
sudo install -m0644 docs/user/drivel.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/drivel.1

Where Drivel keeps things

With -account NAME, everything follows the XDG base directories:

Both credential files are written 0600. Neither the state database nor the path index is a credential, and neither is authoritative: deleting them costs API round trips, never data. See Data safety .

Without -account, the flag defaults put credentials.json, token.json, drivel-state.db and drivel-index.db in the working directory instead.

Uninstalling

fusermount3 -u ~/drive                    # unmount first (or just Ctrl-C the process)

sudo make uninstall                       # if you installed with `sudo make install`
rm "$(command -v drivel)"                 # if you installed with `go install`
rm ~/go/bin/drivel-provider-*             # ...and the backends it installed beside it

rm -rf ~/.config/drivel ~/.local/state/drivel ~/.local/share/drivel

make uninstall takes the backends, the man page, the mount(8) helper symlinks and the shell completions with it; rm "$(command -v drivel)" removes only the one binary, which is why the backends need the line after it. Remove any /etc/fstab lines of type fuse.drivel or drivel as well.

Revoke the OAuth client from the Google Cloud Console if you are done with it — deleting the client immediately invalidates every token minted from it.

Getting your data out

You do not need Drivel to read your files. The backing directory — whatever data = or -data points at — is a plain directory of plain files. Unmount and it is still there, and everything in it opens with any program.

Two things to know before you walk away:

• In lazy mode , placeholders are not files yet. A file that has never been read is a zero-byte hole marked with an extended attribute; its content is still only in Drive. Before uninstalling, either read everything you want to keep (find ~/.cache/drivel/personal -type f -exec cat {} + >/dev/null) or fetch it from Drive directly.
• In-place mode has no separate directory — the mounted directory is the backing store, and the files simply stay in it when Drivel exits.

Conflict copies (files named NAME (conflict 2026-09-07 12-34-56).ext) are local-only by design and were never uploaded. They are yours to keep or delete.