Autofs + rclone mount for Google Drive

Howto Guides
1

There are several forum posts struggling to get autofs working with rclone mount. (1, 2, 3, etc.)

Below is what worked for me to get on-demand access to Google Drive (both "My Files" and also all of my shared team drives).

  1. Create ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf like usual (this file is owned by the user)
[gdrive-user@gmail.com]
type = drive
scope = drive
token = {"access_token": "...", "token_type":"Bearer","refresh_token": "...","expires_in":3599}
team_drive =
  1. Add an entry to /etc/auto.master (owned by root)
/-    /etc/auto.gdrive browse,allow_other
  1. Create a /etc/auto.gdrive (owned by root)
/gdrive/user@gmail.com/MyDrive -fstype=rclone,uid=1000,gid=1000,vfs-cache-mode=full,config=/home/user/.config/rclone/rclone.conf :gdrive-username\@gmail.com\:/
/gdrive/user@gmail.com/Management\ Team -fstype=rclone,uid=1000,gid=1000,vfs-cache-mode=full,config=/home/user/.config/rclone/rclone.conf,drive-team-drive=9JhG2U8Abjd9g38 :gdrive-username\@gmail.com\:/
/gdrive/user@gmail.com/Maintenance\ Team -fstype=rclone,uid=1000,gid=1000,vfs-cache-mode=full,config=/home/user/.config/rclone/rclone.conf,drive-team-drive=8wEx2U8Abjd9g32 :gdrive-username\@gmail.com\:/
  1. Start autofs
service restart autofs
service enable autofs

That's all. It just works.

It also works if you have multiple Google Drive accounts. I create a python script to auto-generate auto.gdrive by enumerating all the Google Drive entries in rclone.conf and then enumerating all of the shared (team) drives on each account.

generate-gdrive-autofs.py

import json
import subprocess
import sys

CONFIG = "/home/luke/.config/rclone/rclone.conf"
UID = 1000
GID = 1000


def get_rclone_remotes():
    command = f"rclone --config={CONFIG} listremotes --type=drive"
    p = subprocess.Popen(command, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    p.wait()
    if p.returncode != 0:
        print(command)
        print("Command failed with code {}".format(p.returncode))
        sys.exit(1)

    lines = p.stdout.readlines() if p.stdout else []
    return [line.decode("ascii").strip() for line in lines]


def get_shared_drives(remote):
    command = f"rclone --config={CONFIG} backend drives {remote}"

    p = subprocess.Popen(command, shell=True, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    p.wait()
    if p.returncode != 0:
        print(command)
        print("Command failed with code {}".format(p.returncode))
        sys.exit(1)
    return json.load(p.stdout) if p.stdout else []


mounts = []

for remote in get_rclone_remotes():
    name = remote.strip().lstrip("gdrive-").rstrip(":")
    print(name)

    quoted_remote = remote.replace("@", "\\@").replace(":", "\\:")
    mounts.append(
        f"/gdrive/{name}/MyDrive -fstype=rclone,uid={UID},gid={GID},vfs-cache-mode=full,config={CONFIG} :{quoted_remote}/"
    )

    for shared_drive in get_shared_drives(remote):
        print(f"  {shared_drive.get('name')}")
        mounts.append(
            f"/gdrive/{name}/{shared_drive.get('name').replace(' ', '\\ ')} "
            f"-fstype=rclone,uid={UID},gid={GID},vfs-cache-mode=full,config={CONFIG},drive-team-drive={shared_drive.get('id')} "
            f":{quoted_remote}/"
        )

for m in mounts:
    print(m)

If this is useful to anyone, perhaps there is a better way to package it and make it available as a systemd unit or something. Feedback welcome.