I had to mirror some public Google Drive folder to an object storage service. Rclone can do this easily, but configuring it is a bit tricky.

Prerequisites

• Rclone installed
• A Google Cloud Project with Drive API enabled
• A Google Cloud service account — you can create a service account without giving it any permission, as a public folder can already be accessed by anyone

Configuration

[gdrivepublic]
type = drive
scope = drive.readonly
service_account_file = /path/to/gdrivepublic.service-account.json

Normally we would have to configure the root_folder_id setting, but this setting can also be configured from the environment variables, which is what we will use.

Usage

Then you can use the RCLONE_CONFIG_GDRIVEPUBLIC_ROOT_FOLDER_ID environment variable to specify the public folder ID. For example:

env RCLONE_CONFIG_GDRIVEPUBLIC_ROOT_FOLDER_ID=… rclone lsjson gdrivepublic: --recursive --files-only