Open source Google Drive sync client for Linux (then macOS and Windows), with bidirectional event-driven synchronization on both sides — inotify locally, changes.list + pageToken remotely.

Google does not ship an official Google Drive client for Linux. The only confortable third-party alternative (Insync) is paid, and existing OSS tools (rclone bisync, google-drive-ocamlfuse, GNOME Online Accounts) either rely on periodic polling or are not real sync engines.

air-drive aims to fill that gap with a small Rust daemon that reacts to events on both sides, embeds rclone as the underlying sync engine, and exposes a lightweight desktop UI via Tauri.

🚧 MVP shipped. Bidirectional event-driven sync, single Drive account, one mapped folder pair, integration-tested against a mocked Drive API and end-to-end against a real Drive account + rclone. See tests/e2e/README.md for how to set up a Google account for the live-Drive integration suite.

Tests: 111 unit + ~30 integration (mocked) + 3 e2e (real Drive). cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings clean. CI runs the mocked suite on every push (.github/workflows/ci.yml); the real-Drive suite triggers on main + manual dispatch (.github/workflows/e2e.yml).

See CLAUDE.md for the project's principles, technology stack, and quality gates.

Full documentation lives under docs/, indexed by docs/README.md:

• User guides — installation, CLI reference, configuration, OAuth setup.
• Internals — architecture, sync model, state schema, development.
• Project — roadmap.

Contributors should also read CONTRIBUTING.md.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Toilal/air-drive/main/install.sh | bash

The script picks the right target triple for your kernel/arch (defaults to the fully-static musl build), pulls the latest release tarball from the GitHub Release page, verifies its SHA-256 against the published .sha256 sibling, and drops air-drive into ~/.local/bin/. Pass --systemd to also enable the systemd user unit:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Toilal/air-drive/main/install.sh \
    | bash -s -- --systemd

After building (cargo build --release → target/release/air-drive), drop the binary on your $PATH and let setup --install-service drop the systemd user unit:

install -m 0755 target/release/air-drive ~/.local/bin/
air-drive setup --install-service

That copies assets/systemd/air-drive.service to ~/.config/systemd/user/air-drive.service and runs systemctl --user enable --now air-drive.service. Logs land in journald (journalctl --user -u air-drive -f).

Then link the account + map a folder once:

air-drive link
air-drive map ~/Drive 'path:My Drive/Sync'
air-drive status         # confirms state, mapping, pending counters

air-drive requests the full https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive scope on the consent screen — wording on Google's prompt is roughly "See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files". The narrower drive.file scope only exposes files the daemon itself created, which makes it impossible to sync an already-populated Drive folder (the original blocker reported in issue #4).

Google classifies drive as a sensitive scope. OAuth clients in Testing mode work fine but cap refresh tokens at 7 days, so the daemon will prompt for re-consent every week. Moving the client to Production requires Google's OAuth verification review (security assessment, homepage + privacy-policy URLs, possibly a demo video). See CLAUDE.md §V for the constitution-level rationale.

• Language: Rust (stable)
• Async runtime: tokio
• Local watcher: notify
• HTTP / OAuth: reqwest + yup-oauth2
• Persistence: SQLite via rusqlite
• UI: Tauri v2
• Sync engine: rclone embedded as a subprocess (behind a SyncEngine trait — a native Rust engine is the long-term goal)

Apache License 2.0. See NOTICE for attribution.

When the v1.0 bundle ships the rclone binary, third-party licenses (MIT for rclone, others for transitive deps) will be listed in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.