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: v1.0.2, 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.

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.