drive-share

A lightweight Go client for generating Google Drive share links quickly. This is still very much in pre-alpha version and only created for personal use at the moment. That said, if you wish to use this tool, you will find instructions for installing and running it below.

Using drive-share

Running drive-share -name [name-of-file] where the name-of-file is the name of some file in your Google Drive that has been set to shared mode will automatically copy a link to your clipboard that, when sent to anybody, will allow them to view or download that file.

At the moment, this does not take into files with the same names, but in different folders. It will print all the files with the matching name and their web URLS and copy the last item in the list to your clipboard.

Setting up drive-share

Getting a Google Drive API

1. Go to Google's developer console and create a new project.
2. Open the project and search for the Drive API in the library.
3. Enable the API for your project.
4. Generate your OAUTH2 credentials for it.
5. Download the json file generated.

Making an installation folder

1. Create a folder somewhere on your computer.
2. Move over the json file containing your credentials to this folder.
3. Rename it client_id.json.
4. Download the drive-share executable from the build/OS directory of this repo corresponding to your OS.

Running the executable for the first time

1. Open up a terminal prompt in the folder.
2. Run drive-share in this prompt. It will generate a link to an authorization page.
3. Follow this link. Approve the permissions and copy the ID given to you.
4. Paste the ID back into the terminal prompt.

Future runs of the executable will not require authorization. A token will automatically be placed in your folder that caches the auuthorization header.

To-Do's

• Implement a flag to take into account folder locations
• Implement functionality to give shortcuts to file names that you often share
• Implement more searching flags (instead of exact file name match, allow contains or time range matching)
• Sort out client secret so that every user doesn't have to start up their own Drive API instance.

Motivation

Why build this?

I decided to start building this because I found myself having to send or upload copies of my CV constantly, being in the third year of my university degree and applying to tons of graduate jobs. It got annoying having to constantly open my Google Drive and wait for the UI to load, navigate through various folders and then right-click the the file I wanted and copy it. This utility now means that I simply have to pop drive-share -name cv.pdf into a terminal window (which I usually have open anyway) and ctrl-V into whatever text field I need. It's far from perfect and very rough around the edges. I'd love to hear any feedback related to improving it.

Why Go(lang)?

I've been eyeing Go recently. It looks like a very neat, lightweight and efficient language. Building this was one way to help me really dive into learning it properly. It's been doings its job very well so far. The support for cross-compilation is amazing and really useful in this case.