google-drive-mcp

A Model Context Protocol server for Google Drive, written in Go: find files and know where they live and who can see them, organise folders, move and copy, get content in and out, share without widening access by accident, follow what changed, and manage shared drives. It stops at the file boundary; what happens inside a Google Doc, Sheet or Slides deck is out of scope and belongs to servers built on the Docs, Sheets and Slides APIs.

Single binary, stdio, one Google account per profile. You run it against a Google Cloud project you own, so nothing about this repository is tied to any particular organisation or account.

Status: v1.0.1, phase 6 of the plan in docs/architecture.md. The tools below work, and every one of them is verified against a real Google Workspace account as well as against the in-memory Drive the tests use — the five that remove something for good included, which run inside a shared drive the live driver creates and destroys again. Four paths are not: handing over ownership of a file, opening a link-shared file that needs its resource key, a share an organisation's policy refuses, and applying a label. Each needs a second Google account or an administrator to exercise, and docs/architecture.md §17a says what stands in for each of them.

What it does today

Three more are registered only when the deployer turns their feature on, because each needs a scope the consent screen would otherwise not carry: list_labels and manage_labels with GDRIVE_LABELS=true, and list_activity with GDRIVE_ACTIVITY=true.

Five more are registered only with GDRIVE_ENABLE_DESTRUCTIVE=true, and each of those also needs confirm: true on the call itself: delete_file, empty_trash, delete_drive, delete_revision and delete_comment.

Three of the reads are also resources, for a client that attaches them rather than calling a tool: gdrive://<id> is the file's text, gdrive://<id>/meta is the description, and gdrive://<id>/children is a folder's first page. A reference with a slash in it — a path, a URL — has to be percent-encoded there, so pass an id.

Five things it does differently from the alternatives:

• Shared drives work from the first call. Every request carries supportsAllDrives, listings include items from all drives, and an incomplete search says so instead of quietly returning less.

• Ids are the contract. A name or path matching more than one item comes back as [ambiguous] with every candidate listed. Nothing takes the first match.

• Location is always shown. Names are not unique in Drive, so every result says which folder, and which drive, a file sits in.

• Files go one place only. Downloads land in GDRIVE_LOCAL_DIR and uploads are read from it; unset, there is no file transfer at all. A path outside it is refused, symlinks included.

• Sharing shows its work. Every grant or revocation reports who could see the file before and who can see it after. A public link needs allow_anyone: true and an ownership transfer needs transfer_ownership: true, on the call itself. No notification mail goes out unless you ask for it, which is the opposite of the API's own default.

Related MCP server: MCP Google Drive Server

Install

go install github.com/mmedum/google-drive-mcp/cmd/google-drive-mcp@latest

That puts the binary in Go's bin directory, which is often not on your PATH. If the next command says command not found, either use the full path or add the directory once:

"$(go env GOPATH)/bin/google-drive-mcp" --version    # check it landed
export PATH="$(go env GOPATH)/bin:$PATH"             # or add it to your shell profile

Or take a signed archive from the latest release — Linux, macOS and Windows, on amd64 and arm64 — and put the binary on your PATH. Every archive carries the binary, LICENSE and this README. Nothing about a release has to be taken on trust:

# --ignore-missing, because checksums.txt covers every archive and you
# will have downloaded one of them.
sha256sum -c checksums.txt --ignore-missing

# checksums.txt is signed with a keyless Sigstore certificate tied to the
# release workflow's identity; the bundle carries the signature and the
# certificate together.
cosign verify-blob checksums.txt --bundle checksums.txt.bundle \
  --certificate-identity-regexp '^https://github.com/mmedum/google-drive-mcp' \
  --certificate-oidc-issuer https://token.actions.githubusercontent.com

# And each archive carries build provenance naming the workflow and tag
# that produced it.
gh attestation verify google-drive-mcp_*.tar.gz --repo mmedum/google-drive-mcp

Every archive also ships an SBOM, so you can see what is inside a binary you did not build.

Claude Desktop

Every release also carries a .mcpb bundle. Open it and Claude Desktop installs the server and asks for your OAuth client JSON — no config file to edit. It covers macOS, Windows and Linux on both architectures each: macOS through a universal binary, Windows through amd64, and Linux through a small launcher that picks the right binary at start, because a bundle manifest names a command per platform and has no key for the architecture. Its SHA-256 is in the same signed checksums.txt.

The bundle does not log you in. Install the binary as well, run google-drive-mcp login once, and the bundle picks up the same credentials. Claude Code does not install .mcpb files, so it uses the command below.

Set up Google, once per person

You need your own Google Cloud project and your own OAuth client. This takes about five minutes, and google-drive-mcp doctor tells you which step you missed.

1. Create a project at console.cloud.google.com.

2. Enable the Google Drive API for it, under APIs & Services → Library.

3. Configure the OAuth consent screen.

   • On a Google Workspace account, choose Internal. Refresh tokens do not expire.

   • On a personal account, choose External, leave it in Testing, and add your own address as a test user. Google expires refresh tokens for a Testing app after 7 days, so you will re-run login about once a week.

4. Add the scopes this server asks for. Which ones depends on how you run it, and login requests exactly the set your configuration needs — so add the ones you will use, and re-run login if you turn a feature on later. All of them are restricted scopes, which is fine for an app only you use and never publish.

   Scope	Requested when
   https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive	always, unless read-only
   https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.readonly	instead of it, with GDRIVE_READ_ONLY=true
   https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.labels	with GDRIVE_LABELS=true
   https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.labels.readonly	with GDRIVE_LABELS=true and read-only
   https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.activity.readonly	with GDRIVE_ACTIVITY=true

   google-drive-mcp doctor names any scope your token is missing, which is what to run if a call comes back refused after you change a flag.

5. Create credentials → OAuth client ID → Desktop app, and download the JSON. A Web application client will not work: this server uses the loopback flow Google documents for desktop apps.

6. Put the JSON where the server looks, or point at it:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/google-drive-mcp
   cp ~/Downloads/client_secret_*.json ~/.config/google-drive-mcp/client_secret.json

7. Log in and check:

   google-drive-mcp login
   google-drive-mcp doctor

login opens a browser, receives the callback on 127.0.0.1 with PKCE, and stores the refresh token in your OS keyring (Secret Service, Keychain or Credential Manager). If no keyring is available it falls back to a 0600 file and says so. logout revokes the token at Google and deletes it locally.

Logging in over SSH

The callback goes to the remote host's loopback address and your browser is local, so the port has to be forwarded. It is drawn at random and printed only once login is already waiting, so read it out of the printed URL — it appears percent-encoded there, as 127.0.0.1%3A<port> — and in a second local terminal:

ssh -N -L <port>:127.0.0.1:<port> user@remote-host

Then open the URL in your local browser. If ssh says bind: Address already in use, cancel the login with Ctrl-C and start it again to draw a different port.

Connect a client

Claude Code

claude mcp add google-drive -- google-drive-mcp

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) and Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json) take the same shape:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google-drive": {
      "command": "google-drive-mcp",
      "env": {
        "GDRIVE_LOCAL_DIR": "/absolute/path/for/downloads"
      }
    }
  }
}

All three clients pass only command, args and env, which is why every setting is an environment variable.

Configuration

Every setting is a GDRIVE_* environment variable with a matching flag. The full list, with defaults, is in docs/configuration.md. The ones that change what the server will do at all:

What it will not do

• Edit the content of a Google Doc, Sheet or Slides deck. It reads them through Google's export and says so. A comment made here sits on the file rather than on a passage of the document: pinning one to a place in a Doc is a Docs API feature, and this server does not use that API.

• Widen access without being asked. Sharing tools check capabilities.canShare first, show who can see a file before and after, need allow_anyone: true for a public link, and send no notification mail unless you ask for it. What may actually be shared is decided by your organisation's own policy, which Google enforces on every call.

• Destroy anything without a way back, by default. Trash and restore are the default surface; permanent deletion is gated behind GDRIVE_ENABLE_DESTRUCTIVE=true and needs confirm: true on the call, because a registered tool is one a model will reach for eventually. There is no bulk delete and no bulk share: one item per call, so every removal is a visible approval. Deleting the top of a drive is refused outright.

• Talk to anything but Google. Every URL is checked against an allowlist of Google's own hosts before credentials are attached. No telemetry, no update checks.

• Write anything private into its logs. They carry truncated ids, counts, byte counts and latencies; never file names, paths, addresses, queries or content.

How it works

MCP client ──stdio──► google-drive-mcp
                       ├── tools      one handler per tool; shapes the reply
                       ├── service    the rules: addressing, sharing policy, confinement
                       ├── model      the server's view of a file, and what you may do to it
                       ├── render     the text a result is made of
                       ├── gapi       raw REST client for Drive, Drive Labels and Drive Activity
                       ├── gdrive     hand-written wire types, no generated client
                       ├── ref        ids, URLs and paths; resolves nothing over the network
                       └── auth       refresh token → access token

docs/architecture.md has the design, the package layout, the phase plan, and an evidence log recording which conventions were checked against Google's own reference and which turned out to be wrong. docs/security.md is what it touches and what limits it.

Development

make build     # the binary
make test      # race detector, per-package coverage floor
make check     # everything CI runs
make live      # drive the binary against the signed-in account, redacted

make check is the definition of done: gofmt, go vet, golangci-lint, race tests with a per-package coverage floor, govulncheck, a licence check, a leak check over the working tree, pinned-version and error-class gates, an API-coverage gate holding every method of all three APIs to a recorded decision, a bundle-manifest gate holding the committed manifest to the files the packer stages, a registry gate holding the published entry to the rules the MCP registry enforces in code, a transcript gate refusing any way for a program that drives a real account to reach a terminal except through the redactor, a live-coverage gate holding every tool option to a decision about whether the live driver drives it, an outcome gate refusing a result sentence written from the request rather than from the response, a stdio smoke test, a schema diff against the released tool surface, a staleness gate that fails when this README, the docs or the changelog drift from the code, and a parity gate asserting that make check and CI run the same set of gates.

Conventions are in CONTRIBUTING.md; building, testing and releasing are in docs/development.md.

Versioning

Tool names, their arguments and the shape of their output are stable within a major version. A change that needs you to do something — a new scope, another login, a different command in your client config — is marked Breaking: in CHANGELOG.md, which is what the release notes are made from. A tool moving from the default surface to behind a feature flag, or the other way, counts as breaking.

Security

SECURITY.md says how to report a vulnerability. Please do not open a public issue for one.

Code of conduct

CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md — Contributor Covenant 3.0.

Documentation

• docs/architecture.md — the design, the evidence behind it, and the phase plan.

• docs/configuration.md — every setting.

• docs/security.md — what it touches and what limits it.

• docs/development.md — building, testing, releasing.

• CONTRIBUTING.md — ground rules and the pull request flow.

• CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md — Contributor Covenant 3.0.

• SECURITY.md — reporting a vulnerability.

Licence

Apache-2.0.