Quickstart

From nothing to a mounted Drive folder. Three steps; the middle one is a one-time Google setup.

1. Install

You need Go 1.27+ and a FUSE mount helper.

# Linux: the mount helper (fusermount3)
sudo apt install fuse3        # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dnf install fuse3        # Fedora

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

That puts both in $(go env GOPATH)/bin. The second one is the Google Drive backend: Drivel runs its backends as separate programs and starts them for you, so you install the ones you use and a crash in one cannot take your filesystem down. See Installing for building from a checkout, macOS and FreeBSD, and shell completions.

2. Get Google credentials

Drivel ships no application identity, so you create your own OAuth client in a Google Cloud project you own. It is free and takes about five minutes: Google credentials .

You end up with a client ID and client secret.

3. Log in and mount

drivel login -account personal

The wizard asks for the client ID/secret and a scope, prints an authorization URL, and captures the result — either automatically, via a loopback server on port 53682, or by you pasting the redirect URL back into the prompt. It writes credentials and a token under ~/.config/drivel/personal/, and appends an [account.personal] block to ~/.config/drivel/config.toml.

It also prints a [[mount]] block to go with it. Add that to the config file:

[[mount]]
account = "personal"
path    = "~/drive-personal"              # where the folder appears
data    = "~/.cache/drivel/personal"      # where the files really live

[mount.provider]
root = "root"                             # "root" is the whole of My Drive

path and data are yours to change — the printed block just names them after the account. Then:

mkdir -p ~/drive-personal ~/.cache/drivel/personal
drivel mount

~/drive-personal is now your Drive. Edit files with anything; changes upload in the background, and changes made elsewhere appear within seconds. Ctrl-C unmounts.

Without a config file

A single mount needs no config at all — the flags are enough, and mount is the default subcommand:

drivel login                              # writes ./credentials.json, ./token.json
drivel mount -mount ./mnt -data ./data \
  -credentials credentials.json -token token.json

Omit -credentials and Drivel runs log-only: it mounts and proxies, and prints the changes it would sync without contacting Google. Useful for seeing what it does before you point it at real data.

What just happened

~/drive is a FUSE mount. Every operation on it is proxied to the backing directory (~/.cache/drivel/personal), which holds the real files and is the source of truth. Mutations become events on a queue that a sync engine drains in the background, so no filesystem operation ever waits on the network. In the other direction a poll loop follows Drive’s change feed and applies remote edits to the backing directory.

Next

• If your Drive already has files in it, the first run enumerates them. In the default (eager) mode Drivel does not download them all unless you pass -materialize; in lazy mode the whole tree appears immediately and costs nothing until you read a file.
• Before you point this at data you care about, read Data safety — particularly what Drivel does when two machines edit the same file, and the guards on deletion.