Could You Make It Just A Little More Difficult?

Every so often, you need to share out an HTML file via a public web-server. Back in the pre-cloud days, this meant that you'd toss it up on your vanity web server and call it a day. In the cloud era, you have other options. Amazon's S3 was the first one that I used, but other cloud-storage services can be leveraged in a similar manner for static content.

One of those others is Google's "Drive" service. Unfortunately, Google doesn't exactly seem to want to make it a straight forward affair to share static web content straight from drive. It's easy if you want viewers to see the raw HTML, but not so great if you want them to see rendered HTML.

At any rate, as of the writing of this document (warning: judging by my Google results, the method seems to change over time and even Google's own help pages aren't really kept up to date), this was what I had to do:

1. Create a new folder in Google Drive (optional: if you're willing to make your top-level gDrive folder publicly-browsable or already have a folder that's set - or you're willing to set - as publicly-browsable, you can skip this step)
2. Edit the sharing on the folder, setting the permission to "Public View"
3. Navigate into the folder. Take note of its path. It will look something like:
   

   https://drive.google.com/drive/#folders/0F3SA-qkPpztNflU1bUtyekYYC091a2ttHZJpMElwTm9UcFNqN1pNMlf3iUlTUkJ0UU5PUVk

4. Take the left part of the URL, up to and including "/#folders/" and nuke it
5. Replace the deleted part of the original URL and replace it with:
   

   http://www.googledrive.com/host/

   The browsable URL to your publicly-viewable folder will now look like:
   

   http://www.googledrive.com/host/0F3SA-qkPpztNflU1bUtyekYYC091a2ttHZJpMElwTm9UcFNqN1pNMlf3iUlTUkJ0UU5PUVk

6. Clicking on  that link will take you to the folder holding your static web content. To get the sharable URL for your file(s), click on the link to the file.
7. When the file opens in your browser, copy the URL for the file, then send it out (for the sake of your recipients' sanity, you might want to pump it through a URL-shorter service, first - like maybe goo.gl)

In my case, I was trying to collaborate on a system-hardening toolset. I'd run my system through a security scanner that had flagged a number of false findings (actually, all the "fail" findings turned out to be bogus). I wanted to share the report with him and the rules files that the security tool had reported against. So, I sorted out the above so I could post links into our collaboration tool.

Maybe one day Google will make sharing static web content from Drive as (relatively) easy as Amazon has with S3. A "share as web page" button sure would be nice.