Let’s get straight to it. Before doing anything fancy, make sure rclone is installed. Use whatever package manager your distro ships with—on my Arch box it’s simply sudo pacman -S rclone.

Create the Google Drive remote

  1. Run rclone config in your terminal.
  2. Pick n) New remote → type n and press Enter.
  3. Give it a name. I called mine gdrive-ripa—choose whatever makes sense for you.
  4. Select Google Drive as the storage type (in my menu it was option 18).
  5. Leave client_id and client_secret empty unless you have your own OAuth credentials.
  6. For the scope, I go with option 1: Full access to all files (drive).
  7. Skip service_account_file unless you know you need it.
  8. When asked about advanced config, I answer n) No.
  9. Say y to open a browser window for authentication, then sign in with the Google account you want to expose to rclone.
  10. I don’t use Shared Drives, so I answer n) No to that prompt too.
  11. Confirm everything with y) Yes this is OK when rclone summarizes the remote.

You should now see something like this:

Current remotes:

Name                 Type
====                 ====
gdrive-ripa          drive

e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/c/s/q> q

Hit q (or Ctrl+C) to exit the config tool.

Mount the remote

  1. Create a folder that will act like your “Google Drive” view. I use mkdir ~/Google-Drive.

  2. Mount the remote to that folder:

    ripa@arch:[~]$ rclone mount gdrive-ripa: ~/Google-Drive/

Keep that terminal window open—rclone mount runs in the foreground. Peek inside ~/Google-Drive/ and you should see the same contents as your actual Drive. If everything looks good, congrats, the mount works.

  • To unmount, just close the terminal or hit Ctrl+C in the window that’s running rclone mount.

  • Want it in the background? Add & to the command:

    ripa@arch:[~]$ rclone mount gdrive-ripa: ~/Google-Drive/ &

That’s it—now your Google Drive behaves like any other folder on your system.