I need to grab a file from Google Drive directly onto my Linux server without downloading it to my computer first. The file I want is stored on Google Drive and I can see it in my browser, but I’m having trouble getting it through the terminal.
I tried using wget with the direct file URL but it just gave me a 404 error:
This didn’t work at all. I’m wondering if there’s a way to use wget or maybe curl to download files from Google Drive directly to a remote server. Are there any special parameters or URL formats I should use? Or maybe there are other command line tools that work better for this kind of task?
I really want to avoid having to download the file to my local machine first and then upload it to the server since the file is pretty large.
Google Drive doesn’t serve files directly through those URLs. You need to change the URL format to work with wget or curl. For public files, use: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=FILE_ID where FILE_ID is that long string from your original URL. Your command becomes wget "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1A2B3C4D5E6F7G8H9I0J" -O model_data.pkl. This only works if the file’s publicly accessible though. Files needing authentication or larger than 25MB will redirect you to a warning page, and you’ll have to handle the confirmation token. For those cases, just use rclone instead - it’s built for cloud storage and handles Google Drive authentication way better than basic wget.
I’ve hit this exact problem before - gdown is your best option. It’s a Python package built specifically for downloading Google Drive files from command line. Just pip install gdown then run gdown https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1A2B3C4D5E6F7G8H9I0J or gdown 1A2B3C4D5E6F7G8H9I0J with the file ID. Handles large files and Google’s confirmation prompts automatically. I’ve used it on production servers for multi-GB model files - zero issues. Way better than fighting with wget and URL formatting, especially with Google’s anti-bot stuff.
you could also use the gdrive CLI tool - it’s solid for this. install with go get github.com/gdrive-org/gdrive, run gdrive about once to authenticate, then just gdrive download 1A2B3C4D5E6F7G8H9I0J. auth happens automatically and it works with private files, unlike wget.