Install goodls with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• goodls

Project history

The repository was created on January 10, 2018, the same date the README's update history records v1.0.0 as the initial release. Early changes added stdin URL lists, large-file chunk saving, progress display, and folder downloads that preserve structure when an API key is supplied.

The project continued to track Google Drive behavior changes. The update history records multiple fixes for changed large-file download specifications, a migration to newer Google Drive API client methods, and later work on concurrency, conflict handling, JSON output, proxy and retry behavior, Colab URL handling, and an MCP server mode.

Adoption history

goodls is distributed as a Homebrew formula and through GitHub release binaries. The README also documents building from source with go install, which keeps it available to Go users even when package-manager coverage is thin.

Its adoption surface is narrower than general-purpose sync tools because it focuses on shared-file and shared-folder downloads rather than full Google Drive synchronization. That specificity is also the reason it is useful in scripts, CI jobs, data pulls, and agent workflows where OAuth setup would be heavy.

How it is used

Typical usage is `goodls -u URL` for public shared files without authentication. Entire shared folders require a Google Cloud API key, which can be passed on the command line or through GOODLS_APIKEY, and downloads can preserve folder structure.

The README documents resumable large-file chunks, MIME filtering, output directory selection, conflict strategies, skip-on-error behavior, concurrency control, JSON output, proxy and retry options, and an MCP stdio server exposing a download tool.

Why package nerds care

goodls matters to package nerds as a highly specific web-service CLI: it packages the messy operational knowledge of Google Drive download URLs, warning pages, API-key folder listing, resumable chunks, and headless output into a single executable.

The 2026 MCP mode also makes it an example of a traditional CLI being repurposed as an agent-callable tool while retaining normal shell usage.

Timeline

• 2018-01-10: Initial release recorded in README update history.
• 2018: stdin URL lists, large-file chunk saving, progress display, folder downloads, API-key support, and Google Docs conversion were added across the 1.0 and 1.1 series.
• 2022: v2.0.0 migrated to updated Google Drive API client methods.
• 2023: v2.0.5 changed API-key large-file download handling after Drive behavior changes.
• 2026-05: v3.2.0 introduced concurrency and multi-progress UI.
• 2026-06: v3.3.x and v3.4.0 added conflict handling, MCP server support, proxy and retry options, JSON output, and Colab URL support.

Related projects

• Google Drive and the Google Drive API are the service surfaces goodls automates.
• go-getfilelist appears in the README update history as a related library dependency used for Drive file listing.
• rclone and gdown are adjacent tools in the broader command-line cloud-file download space, though goodls is narrower and Drive-share focused.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/tanaikech/goodls
• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/goodls
• https://github.com/tanaikech/goodls
• https://github.com/tanaikech/goodls/releases
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tanaikech/goodls/master/README.md