Raspbian OS (Raspberry Pi) do not mount USB drives automatically out of the box.

I’m pretty annoyed by the lack of easy to use packages by 2021 and I still have to do it myself with the instructions here: https://github.com/avanc/mopidy-vintage/wiki/Automount-USB-sticks

These are cookbook instructions, but I’ll add some insights to what each component means so it’s easier to remember the steps.

At top level, to auto-detect and mount USB drives, we need the following components

• udev: analogous to what happens behind device manager, it keeps track of and updates devices as they are connected and disconnected immediately. Need to register USB sticks by adding a event handler, which triggers a systemd service (see below)
• systemd: analogous to Windows’ services. Need to register the service by stating what commands it will call on start (mostly mounting) and cleanup (mostly unmounting)
• automount script: it’s a user defined script that abstracts most of the hard work detecting the partitions on the USB stick, assign the mount point names, and mount them

# Register udev event handler (rules)
# /etc/udev/rules.d/usbstick.rules

ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="sd[a-z][0-9]", TAG+="systemd", ENV{SYSTEMD_WANTS}="usbstick-handler@%k"

# It triggers a systemd call to "usbstick-handler@" service registered under /etc/systemd/system/

# Register systemd service
# /etc/systemd/system/usbstick-handler@.service
# (Note: instructions used /lib instead of /etc. It's better to add it as /etc as this is manually registered as user-defined service rather than from a package)

[Unit]
Description=Mount USB sticks
BindsTo=dev-%i.device
After=dev-%i.device

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/automount %I
ExecStop=/usr/bin/pumount /dev/%I

# %I is the USB stick's device name under /dev, usually sda
# Abstracted the logic of determining the mount point name and mounting to 'automount' (see below)

Create the file /usr/local/bin/automount and give it execution permission: chmod +x /usr/local/bin/automount

#!/bin/bash

# $1 (first argument) is usually "sda" (supposedly USB stick device name) seen from %I in the systemd service commands
PART=$1

# Within the "sda" (USB stick device of interest), extract the partition labels (if applicable) from lsblk command. The first column (name) is dropped
FS_LABEL=`lsblk -o name,label | grep ${PART} | awk '{print $2}'`

# Decide the mount point name {partition label}_{partition name}
# e.g. MS-DOS_sda1
tokens=($FS_LABEL)
tokens+=($PART)
MOUNT_LABEL=$(IFS='_'; echo "${tokens[*]}")
# Using string array makes it easier to drop the prefix if there's no {partition label}
# Bash use IFS to specify separators for listing all elements of the array

# Suggestion: drop --sync for faster USB access (if you can umount properly)
/usr/bin/pmount --umask 000 --noatime -w --sync /dev/${PART} /media/${MOUNT_LABEL}

This automount script is adapted from https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/66169/auto-mount-usb-stick-on-plug-in-without-uuid with my improvements.