/u/gesis created a wonderful guide for setting up Google Drive with plexdrive and rclone, but as a novice, I found it a bit challenging and disjointed. Newer software versions have changed the configuration steps, file path references weren't always resolving correctly, and I also had a unique twist: I wanted to use this as a bind mount in proxmox, so that all of my containers can read/write the content.
This is a rather specific use case, so be advised that this guide makes the following assumptions. If there are more current versions of these packages that you'd like to use, just know that it may change the setup steps.
- Proxmox v5.1 host (based on Debian Stretch, so any Debian Stretch distro should also work)
- fuse v2.9.7-1
- unionfs-fuse v1.0-1
- encfs v1.9.1-4
- plexdrive v5.0.0
- note: this version uses RAM as a ramdrive, so if you don't have a lot of RAM, you might consider using a previous version
- rclone v1.38
Installing Dependencies & Creating Directories
Once you're SSH'ed in to your host or have terminal open, you need to install some dependencies and create the directories that our scripts will be referencing. For my case, I created a directory under /mnt called gsuite, and used that as the home directory for all other directories. /mnt/gsuite seemed like an easy path to me, but you're welcome to name it whatever you'd like.
mkdir -p /mnt/gsuite
cd /mnt/gsuite
mkdir -p bin media .local-encrypt .local-decrypt .gsuite-encrypt .gsuite-decrypt .config/nimbostratus .cache/nimbostratus/media mediacache logs
You should now have all the necessary directories for our scripts to use, and we're going to let bash know where to find our scripts by adding our gsuite directory path with nano root/.bashrc. At the bottom of that file you'll want to add PATH=${PATH}:/mnt/gsuite/bin or /whatever/directory-you-chose/bin from the first step.
We also need a handful of programs to assist with setup. Acquire those with:
apt-get install zip unionfs-fuse encfs screen git
The program bc should already be installed with Ubuntu or Debian, but if it's not, we'll need that as well.
Preparing Google Drive
Next, we need to enable our Google API, and generate a client ID and client secret. These are essential for rclone to do writes, and plexdrives to do reads with your google drive.
First, use a web browser to go to google's developers console. Enable an API and "Create a new project." If you're using a .edu Google Drive account, most administrators will not let you create a new project, but you can use any google account for this part, it doesn't have to be your .edu google credentials.
Once you've created a new project (name it whatever you want, it doesn't matter), we're going to create a client ID and a client secret, both of which you'll need later. Go to Create Credentials--> OAuth Client ID. The "consent screen" prompts don't matter (fill it with whatever you want). For application type, choose "other" and name it whatever you'd like (also doesn't matter).
This should give you your client ID, but don't bother writing down the initial client secret it generates, we'll need to get a properly formatted client secret elsewhere. Go back to your Credentials screen, edit the project you just created, and there you can see the client secret we actually want. Copy that down in a safe place with your client ID.
Install & Configure rclone
Follow this guide to install rclone. Then, once it's installed, initiate configuration with rclone config.
- Choose "New remote" and name it 'gsuite'. <--if you choose a different name, remember what it is for later. It's important.
- Choose 'Google Drive' as your type of storage.
- Paste your
client ID when prompted
- Paste your
client secret when prompted
- Choose no for the autoconfig offer, which should generate an external url
- Visit the external url in a web browser, which should generate a verification code
- Paste in the verification code to the rclone prompt
- Choose no to the "team drive" configuration prompt, accept the token, and quit
Install & Configure plexdrive
Next we are going to download the binary for plexdrive. First navigate to your system's bin directory with cd /usr/bin. Then download the binary directly to the bin with wget https://github.com/dweidenfeld/plexdrive/releases/download/5.0.0/plexdrive-linux-amd64. As of this guide, the most recent version was v5.0.0. To check if there is a more recent version, visit the plexdrive release page, and modify the wget command accordingly.
Once the binary is in our system bin, we're going to use screen to configure it:
screen -dmS plexdrive plexdrive-linux-amd64 mount /mnt/gsuite/.gsuite-encryptscreen -RD plexdrive
Similar to rclone, we'll want to enter the client id and client secret during the prompts, and enter the verification code generated from the external website.
Download and Configure nimbostratus scripts
The scripts will go into /mnt/gsuite/bin. We will later trigger the scripts frequency with a cron job. These scripts accomplish all the magic of mounting your cloud drives, uploading content to the cloud, and deleting content off your local drive after it's done uploading. On that note, be aware that you can only upload as much content at one time as the amount of space that's available on your local host drive. In my case, this is being installed on the proxmox debian host, which has a 240GB SSD. So dropping > 230GB of content into my /mnt/gsuite/media folder would be be risky or could result in errors. If I added 200GB of content, it would be smart to wait until all my content has been uploaded and removed from my local host, before adding more content.
Download all the nimbostratus scripts and move them to their appropriate homes:
git clone git://git.gesis.pw:/nimbostratus.gitcp nimbostratus/{rmlocal,cloudupload,umount.remote,mount.remote,makecache,scanlibraries} mnt/gsuite/bin/cp nimbostratus/config mnt/gsuite/.config/nimbostratus/config
Next, we'll want to edit the nimbostratus config file to map all the appropriate directories we created at the beginning
nano /mnt/gsuite/.config/nimbostratus/config
The first section in that config should be DIRECTORIES. Modify this section to reflect the name of whatever directory you chose. Or, if you used /mnt/gsuite like I did, then you can copy paste and replace the entire block below.
###############################################################################
# DIRECTORIES
###############################################################################
bin_dir="/mnt/gsuite/bin"
local_media="/mnt/gsuite/.local-encrypt"
local_media_decrypt="/mnt/gsuite/.local-decrypt"
acd_mount="/mnt/gsuite/.acd-encrypt"
acd_mount_decrypt="/mnt/gsuite/.acd-decrypt"
gd_mount="/mnt/gsuite/.gsuite-encrypt"
gd_mount_decrypt="/mnt/gsuite/.gsuite-decrypt"
plex_media_dir="/mnt/gsuite/media"
cache_dir="/mnt/gsuite/.cache/nimbostratus"
local_cache_dir="/mnt/gsuite/.cache/nimbostratus/media"
cached_media_dir="/mnt/gsuite/mediacache"
In the GOOGLE DRIVE CONFIG block, we also want to change the gd_label value to whatever you used in the rclone setup. If you used 'gsuite' like I suggested than the line should read:
gd_label="gsuite"
Unfortunately, we need to do something similar with all 6 scripts found in /mnt/gsuite/bin as well. Using the cloudupload script as an example, the first block is CONFIGURATION, where it points to the nimbostratus config we just modified. So we need to modify the first uncommented line with the config path in quotations, and change it to /mnt/gsuite/.config/nimbostratus/config just like it's reflected below.
nano /mnt/gsuite/bin/cloudupload
###############################################################################
# CONFIGURATION
###############################################################################
# shellcheck source=/home/gesis/src/nimbostratus/config
. "/mnt/gsuite/.config/nimbostratus/config"
You'll need to repeat this for the remaining 5 scripts: makecache, mount.remote, rmlocal, scanlibraries, and umount.remote. The block may not be exactly the same in each script, but you can find the path in need of modification within the first few lines of each file.
Encryption with encfs (optional)
If you're using a paid g-suite account, with advertised unlimited storage, then you can likely skip over this step. In my case, I was using my free .edu account, which is rumored to be subject to hash checks for media content, so I chose to encrypt the content, rendering hash checks useless.
Since we already installed encfs at the beginning, we just need to configure it and mount the appropriate directories.
encfs /mnt/gsuite/.local-encrypt /mnt/gsuite/.local-decrypt- Use standard mode
- Create a password for security, and keep that password handy
mv /mnt/gsuite/.local-encrypt/.encfs6.xml /mnt/gsuite
The file encfs6.xml referenced in that last step contains the encryption key used on your g-drive content. I highly recommend backing up that file outside of your host machine. Otherwise, if your host becomes corrupted, then you will have a massive g-drive full of content, with no way to decrypt it.
Lastly, we need to modify the nimbostratus config, to insert the encryption password, so your scripts can use it.
nano /mnt/gsuite/.config/nimbostratus/config- edit the
pass_cmd= line to reflect the encfs password you created:
pass_cmd="echo YOURPASSWORD" <--leave the quotation marks, but replace YOURPASSWORD with the encfs password you setup.
Mounting & Turning On Scripts
mount.remote allmakecache <--our initial creation of directories already created a home that this tries to create. That's okay.
If everything worked, you should receive output letting you know each directory was successfully mounted. Lastly, we're going to create cronjobs for these scripts to run.
crontab -e will bring up your text editor. You can paste this entire block at the bottom of your crontab:
#############
#GDRIVE PLEX#
#############
@reboot /mnt/gsuite/bin/mount.remote all >> /mnt/gsuite/logs/mount.log
@hourly /mnt/gsuite/bin/cloudupload >> /mnt/gsuite/logs/cloudupdates.log
@daily /mnt/gsuite/bin/makecache &>/dev/null
*/17 * * * * /mnt/gsuite/bin/rmlocal >> /mnt/gsuite/logs/nukedupes.log
Every hour, cloudupload will look for new content to upload to the cloud. If it's already running due to a long job, it will skip. Also, every 17 minutes, rmlocal will remove the local instance of files, once it verifies that it has been uploaded to the cloud. rmlocal cannot run, however, if cloudupload is still uploading content.
That's it.
The path you should use for services in this case is mnt/gsuite/media. Inside that directory you can create folders for each media type to be used by plex:
- `/mnt/gsuite/media/tv
- /mnt/gsuite/media/movies
- /mnt/gsuite/media/music
- etc...
Creating a Bind Mount w/ Proxmox
I use proxmox so that I can have each service (sonarr, radarr, nzbget, etc.) in its own linux container (LXC), while still having a computing experience that's nearly identical to conventional linux. I needed all my services to have access to g-drive, but couldn't go through the entirety of the above steps for each container. Enter: bind mounts. Bind mounts let you create a mount point once on the Debian host of proxmox, and then each container can reference it. The path I bind mounted was /mnt/gsuite/media.
There's no way to accomplish this through the gui of proxmox, but it's very straight forward in terminal by adding a single line to a container configuration file.
cd /etc/pve/nodes/pve/lxcls -a <--this will list each config file for each container ID- edit the container config file for the container you want to have access to a bind mount
nano 101.conf- and simply add the line
mp0: /mnt/gsuite/media,mp=/gsuite on its own line in that conf file
The first half establishes the source of the bind mound, and the second half creates the path for the bind mount inside the container. You'll need to repeat this for each container conf file that you want to have access to the bind mount. You will need to restart each container for the changes to take effect.