How to mount Google Drive as a file system in Linux

This was surprisingly simple thanks to the excellent google-drive-ocamlfuse project!

For Debian 10 “Buster”, the steps are as follows:

As root:

apt install opam

apt install libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfuse-dev libgmp-dev libsqlite3-dev m4 zlib1g-dev # dependencies for google-drive-ocamlfuse

Then, as unprivileged user, you can install google-drive-ocamlfuse into ~/.opam:

opam init
eval `opam config env` # set needed environment variables
opam update
opam install depext
opam depext google-drive-ocamlfuse
opam install google-drive-ocamlfuse

This compiles a native binary ~/.opam/system/bin/google-drive-ocamlfuse .

The first time, simply run this binary without arguments:

google-drive-ocamlfuse

This will start your default browser where you have to authorize gdfuse to access your Google Drive.

Then, mounting your actual Google Drive is as simple as running

google-drive-ocamlfuse ~/path/to/where/to/mount
ls -l ~/path/to/where/to/mount

Voila! Problem solved in 10 minutes!