Connecting to Google Drive

You can connect to Google Drive from your Coder Workspace to transfer files back and forth.

Note

These instructions require connecting to your Workspace using the VS Code Desktop application. This is required only for giving rclone permissions to access Google Drive. Once you’ve completed that setp, you don’t need to use VS Code.

Map a folder to your Google Drive with rclone

You can use rclone to map a Workspace folder (~/gdrive) to your Google Drive. To avoid deleting anything in your Drive, use read-only permissions (as shown).

  1. Connect to your Workspace using VS Code. Click the VS Code Desktop icon from the Workspace dashboard.

  2. In VS Code, open a Terminal window: View → Terminal (or Ctrl + `). The rest of these instructions are shell commands you’ll enter in the Terminal.

  3. Install rclone

    sudo apt update && sudo apt install rclone

  4. Give rclone read-only access to your Google Drive. (For full read and write permissions, remove scopes drive.readonly. See rclone’s complete documentation for Google Drive scopes).

    rclone config create gdrive drive scopes drive.readonly

  5. A web browser should open. In the browser, grant rclone permission to access your Google Drive. (This access is limited to the Workspace itself). Once completed, you should see a message: “Success! All done. Please go back to rclone.” Close the browser window and go back to the VS Code Terminal window.

  6. Create a folder to map to your Google Drive

    mkdir ~/gdrive

  7. “mount” your Google Drive to the folder

    rclone mount gdrive: ~/gdrive --daemon

  8. Confirm that you can list files in your Drive using the folder.

    ls ~/gdrive

You can now access files in your Google Drive using the ~/gdrive folder. To disconnect the folder from your Drive, use the command: umount ~/gdrive

If umount doesn’t work, it’s often because you have a file open or your terminal is running in a subdirectory of ~/gdrive.