What is the best way to upload a directory to Google drive in R

Question

The googledrive package has the drive_upload function to upload a file to Google drive, but how does one go about uploading an entire directory tree?

Answer 1

Following @DalmTo 's suggestion, I wrote a method to recursively upload a directory to Google drive:

#' Recursively upload a directory to google drive.
#'
#' @param dir Path to the local directory to upload.
#' @param path Specifies the target destination for the new directory on Google
#'   Drive. Defaults to "My Drive" root folder.
#' @param name New directory name. Defaults to `basename(dir)`.
drive_upload_dir <-
  function(
    dir,
    path = NULL,
    name = NULL) {

    if (is.null(name))
      name <- basename(dir)

    assertthat::assert_that(!is.na(file.info(dir)$isdir), file.info(dir)$isdir, msg = "dir must be a directory")

    sub_path <- googledrive::drive_mkdir(name, path)

    for (p in list.files(dir, full.names = TRUE)) {
      if (file.info(p)$isdir) {
        drive_upload_dir(p, path = sub_path)
      } else {
        googledrive::drive_upload(p, path = sub_path)
      }
    }
    return(sub_path)
  }

Note that for directory trees with a large number of files it can be very slow. For my uses, it was more expedient to make a tar archive of the directory and drive_upload the whole archive.