drive

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

Installation

go install github.com/rakyll/drive

Use drive help for further reference.

$ drive init [path]
$ drive pull [-r -no-prompt path] # pulls from remote
$ drive push [-r -no-prompt path] # pushes to the remote
$ drive diff [path] # outputs a diff of local and remote
$ drive publish <path> # publicizes the item and outputs a publicly available URL

Why another Google Drive client?

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

• It's racy. Data has been shared between your remote resource, local disk and 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 sync clients. User has full control 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 fasten your daily interaction with Google Drive backend.

• 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.
• Weak file comparison, we only encounter lastMod and file size. Md5 digest should be a part of the comparison.
• Racing conditions 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.

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.