wget/curl large file from google drive

June 2022

You can use gdown. Consider also visiting that page for full instructions; this is just a summary and the source repo may have more up-to-date instructions.

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Instructions

Install it with the following command:

pip install gdown

After that, you can download any file from Google Drive by running one of these commands:

gdown https://drive.google.com/uc?id=<file_id>  # for files
gdown <file_id>                                 # alternative format
gdown --folder https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/<file_id>  # for folders
gdown --folder --id <file_id>                                   # this format works for folders too

Example: to download the readme file from this directory

gdown https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B7EVK8r0v71pOXBhSUdJWU1MYUk

The file_id should look something like 0Bz8a_Dbh9QhbNU3SGlFaDg. You can find this ID by right-clicking on the file of interest, and selecting Get link. As of November 2021, this link will be of the form:

# Files
https://drive.google.com/file/d/<file_id>/view?usp=sharing
# Folders
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/<file_id>

Caveats

• Only works on open access files. ("Anyone who has a link can View")
• Cannot download more than 50 files into a single folder.
  • If you have access to the source file, you can consider using tar/zip to make it a single file to work around this limitation.

I wrote a Python snippet that downloads a file from Google Drive, given a shareable link. It works, as of August 2017.

The snipped does not use gdrive, nor the Google Drive API. It uses the requests module.

When downloading large files from Google Drive, a single GET request is not sufficient. A second one is needed, and this one has an extra URL parameter called confirm, whose value should equal the value of a certain cookie.

import requests

def download_file_from_google_drive(id, destination):
    def get_confirm_token(response):
        for key, value in response.cookies.items():
            if key.startswith('download_warning'):
                return value

        return None

    def save_response_content(response, destination):
        CHUNK_SIZE = 32768

        with open(destination, "wb") as f:
            for chunk in response.iter_content(CHUNK_SIZE):
                if chunk: # filter out keep-alive new chunks
                    f.write(chunk)

    URL = "https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download"

    session = requests.Session()

    response = session.get(URL, params = { 'id' : id }, stream = True)
    token = get_confirm_token(response)

    if token:
        params = { 'id' : id, 'confirm' : token }
        response = session.get(URL, params = params, stream = True)

    save_response_content(response, destination)    


if __name__ == "__main__":
    import sys
    if len(sys.argv) is not 3:
        print("Usage: python google_drive.py drive_file_id destination_file_path")
    else:
        # TAKE ID FROM SHAREABLE LINK
        file_id = sys.argv[1]
        # DESTINATION FILE ON YOUR DISK
        destination = sys.argv[2]
        download_file_from_google_drive(file_id, destination)