Service Accounts

A service account is a special type of Google account intended to represent a non-human user that needs to authenticate and be authorized to access data in Google APIs. In G Suite domains you can use a service account to programmatically access users data without any manual authorization on their part. To do so, you have to create a service account, and then enable G Suite Domain-wide Delegation. Make sure to have the Google Drive API activated in the project where your service account is located. To use this service account with google-drive-ocamlfuse, you can mount the filesystem with the command line option -serviceaccountpath to specify the path of the credential JSON file you have downloaded creating the account, and -serviceaccountuser to specify the email of the user to impersonate. For example:

google-drive-ocamlfuse -serviceaccountpath /path/to/json -serviceaccountuser [email protected] /path/to/mountpoint

If you don't have a G Suite domain, you can still use a service account but you can't specify an user to impersonate. The service account has its own Drive instance, but you can share files/folders/drives between your regular user and the service account.

If you get userRateLimitExceeded errors, check this quota: Queries per 100 seconds per user in cloud console. The default is 100 and it's too low. You can raise it to 10,000.