blog/data/2018-10-04-grive-google-drive-sync.txt

   1 Title: Automatic Google Drive sync using grive in Debian
   2 Tags: english, debian
   3 Date: 2018-10-04 15:20
   4
   5 <p>A few days, I rescued a Windows victim over to Debian.  To try to
   6 rescue the remains, I helped set up automatic sync with Google Drive.
   7 I did not find any sensible Debian package handling this
   8 automatically, so I rebuild the grive2 source from
   9 <a href="http://www.webupd8.org/">the Ubuntu UPD8 PPA</a> to do the
  10 task and added a autostart desktop entry and a small shell script to
  11 run in the background while the user is logged in to do the sync.
  12 Here is a sketch of the setup for future reference.</p>
  13
  14 <p>I first created <tt>~/googledrive</tt>, entered the directory and
  15 ran '<tt>grive -a</tt>' to authenticate the machine/user.  Next, I
  16 created a autostart hook in <tt>~/.config/autostart/grive.desktop</tt>
  17 to start the sync when the user log in:</p>
  18
  19 <p><blockquote><pre>
  20 [Desktop Entry]
  21 Name=Google drive autosync
  22 Type=Application
  23 Exec=/home/user/bin/grive-sync
  24 </pre></blockquote></p>
  25
  26 <p>Finally, I wrote the <tt>~/bin/grive-sync</tt> script to sync
  27 ~/googledrive/ with the files in Google Drive.</p>
  28
  29 <p><blockquote><pre>
  30 #!/bin/sh
  31 set -e
  32 cd ~/
  33 cleanup() {
  34     if [ "$syncpid" ] ; then
  35         kill $syncpid
  36     fi
  37 }
  38 trap cleanup EXIT INT QUIT
  39 /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh listen googledrive 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%" &
  40 syncpdi=$!
  41 while true; do
  42     if ! xhost >/dev/null 2>&1 ; then
  43         echo "no DISPLAY, exiting as the user probably logged out"
  44         exit 1
  45     fi
  46     if [ ! -e /run/user/1000/grive-sync.sh_googledrive ] ; then
  47         /usr/lib/grive/grive-sync.sh sync googledrive
  48     fi
  49     sleep 300
  50 done 2>&1 | sed "s%^%$0:%"
  51 </pre></blockquote></p>
  52
  53 <p>Feel free to use the setup if you want.  It can be assumed to be
  54 GNU GPL v2 licensed (or any later version, at your leisure), but I
  55 doubt this code is possible to claim copyright on.</p>
  56
  57 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  58 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
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