onedriver

onedriver is a native Linux filesystem for Microsoft OneDrive.

The overwhelming majority of OneDrive clients are actually sync tools, and will actually download the entire contents of your OneDrive to disk. No one wants this. Why are you paying for cloud storage if it has to stay on your local computer?

onedriver is not a sync client. It is a network filesystem that exposes the contents of your OneDrive to the kernel directly. To your computer, there is no difference between working with files on OneDrive and the files on your local hard disk. Just mount onedriver to a directory, and get started with your files on OneDrive!

Getting started with onedriver is as simple as running onedriver /path/to/mount/onedrive/at

Features

• No configuration- it just works. There's nothing to setup. There's no special interface beyond your normal file browser.
• Files are opened and downloaded on-demand, with aggressive caching of file contents and metadata locally. onedriver does not waste disk space on files that are supposed to be stored in the cloud.
• Can be used offline. Files you've opened previously will be available even if your computer has no access to the internet.
• Stateless. Unlike a few other OneDrive clients, there's nothing to break locally. You never have to worry about somehow messing up your local copy and having to figure out how to fix things before you can access your files again.
• All filesystem operations are asynchronous and thread-safe, allowing you to perform as many tasks as you want simultaneously.
• Free and open-source.

Quick start

Users on Fedora/CentOS/RHEL systems are recommended to install onedriver from COPR. This will install the latest version of onedriver through your package manager and ensure it stays up-to-date with bugfixes and new features.

sudo dnf copr enable jstaf/onedriver
sudo dnf install onedriver

Ubuntu/Pop!_OS/Debian users can install onedriver from this PPA. Like the COPR install, this will enable you to install onedriver through your package manager and install updates as they become available.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jstaf/onedriver
sudo apt update
sudo apt install onedriver

Other installation options are available below if you would prefer to manually install things or build the latest version from source.

Post-installation, you can start onedriver either via the app launcher (will authenticate and mount OneDrive at ~/OneDrive, before opening OneDrive in your default file browser) or via the command line: onedriver /path/to/mount/onedrive/at/.

Multiple drives and starting OneDrive on login

To start onedriver automatically and ensure you always have access to your files, you can start onedriver as a systemd user service. In this example, $MOUNTPOINT refers to where we want OneDrive to be mounted at (for instance, ~/OneDrive). Mounting OneDrive via systemd allows multiple drives to be mounted at the same time (as long as they use different mountpoints).

# create the mountpoint and determine the service name
mkdir -p $MOUNTPOINT
export SERVICE_NAME=$(systemd-escape --template [email protected] $MOUNTPOINT)

# mount onedrive
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user start $SERVICE_NAME

# mount onedrive on login
systemctl --user enable $SERVICE_NAME

# check onedriver's logs
journalctl --user -u $SERVICE_NAME

Building onedriver yourself

In addition to the traditional Go tooling, you will need a C compiler and development headers for webkit2gtk-4.0. On Fedora, these can be obtained with dnf install golang gcc pkg-config webkit2gtk3-devel. On Ubuntu, these dependencies can be installed with apt install golang gcc pkg-config libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev.

# to build and run the binary
make
mkdir mount
./onedriver mount/

# in new window, check out the mounted filesystem
ls -l mount

# unmount the filesystem
fusermount -u mount

A headless binary (no GUI) can be built with make onedriver-headless. If you don't know which target to build, this isn't the one for you (run make instead). When using the headless build, follow the text instructions in the terminal to perform first-time authentication to the Microsoft Graph API. Though it's not officially supported, the headless build should work on macOS, BSD, and even Windows as long as you have a variant of FUSE installed (for instance, OSXFUSE on macOS or libfuse on BSD).

Running the tests

There are two test suites - one for online use and one for offline use. Note that the offline tests require sudo to remove network access to simulate no access to the network. A newer version of unshare is compiled before running tests to support running on older distributions like Ubuntu 18.04 where the default version of unshare is too old to use.

# note - the tests will write and delete files/folders on your onedrive account
# at the path /onedriver_tests
make test

Installation

onedriver has multiple installation methods depending on your needs.

# install directly from source
make
sudo make install

# install for current user only
make localinstall

# create an RPM for system-wide installation on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora using mock
sudo dnf install golang gcc webkit2gtk-devel pkg-config git rsync \
    rpmdevtools rpm-build mock
sudo usermod -aG mock $USER
make rpm

# create a .deb for system-wide installation on Ubuntu/Debian using pbuilder
sudo apt update
sudo apt install golang gcc libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev pkg-config git rsync \
    devscripts debhelper build-essential pbuilder
sudo pbuilder create  # may need to specify "--distribution eoan" on ubuntu
make deb

Troubleshooting

Most errors can be solved by simply restarting the program. onedriver is designed to recover cleanly from errors with no extra effort.

It's possible that there may be a deadlock or segfault that I haven't caught in my tests. If this happens, the onedriver filesystem and subsequent ops may hang indefinitely (ops will hang while the kernel waits for the dead onedriver process to respond). When this happens, you can cleanly unmount the filesystem with the following:

# in new terminal window
fusermount -uz mount
killall make  # if running tests via make

Known issues & disclaimer

Many file browsers (like GNOME's Nautilus) will attempt to automatically download all files within a directory in order to create thumbnail images. This is somewhat annoying, but only needs to happen once - after the initial thumbnail images have been created, thumbnails will persist between filesystem restarts.

This project is still in active development and key features may still be missing. To see current progress, check out the projects page.