How To Install Rclone In Linux And Unix

In this Rclone introduction tutorial, we will learn what is Rclone and its important features, how to install Rclone in various Linux operating systems, and finally how to access Rclone Web interface from a web browser.

What is Rclone?

Rclone ("rsync for cloud storage") is a commandline, feature rich cloud sync application to backup and restore files to and from local and cloud storage. Rclone is an opensource program inspired by Rsync and it is written in Go programming language.

Let us see a brief description of some notable features of Rclone.

Rclone features

1. Mount filesystems as a disk

Using Rclone, we can mount a local or cloud or virtual filesystems as a disk in Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems, and serve the local or remote files over SFTP, HTTP, WebDAV, FTP and DLNA.

2. Rclone is secure and safe

Rclone is very secure by design! It encrypts the files before transferring them to a cloud storage and decrypts the files when restoring them from the cloud storage to our local disk.

3. Sync files between different cloud providers

It not only synchronizes files from local to remote cloud storage, but also can sync files between two different cloud services as well. For instance, it is possible to sync files between Google drive and Dropbox using Rclone.

4. Avoid duplicate files

Rclone will not copy the identical files. When using the 'copy' command, it checks the size and modification date or MD5SUM of the files.

If it finds the files are identical on both source and destination, it will simply skip them and copy only the new or changed files instead.

5. Reduce bandwidth and time

Another notable feature is Rclone doesn't use local disk when transferring files from one cloud provider to another. This will significantly reduce the local bandwidth usage as well as the transfer time.

6. Delete local files after moving them

Rclone has an option to move files to cloud storage and delete the local files after verification. This is useful when you don't want to keep same files in multiple locations.

7. Compress and split files

Some cloud providers imposes size limits. So you may not able to upload large files. In such cases, you can either compress them or split the large files into smaller pieces during upload.

The file chunks will be assembled back when the file is downloaded.

8. Verify data integrity

Rclone's work isn't over after uploading the files to the cloud. It also looks after your data.

Rclone will preserve timestamps and verify checksums of the uploaded files all the time for file integrity.It checks data on both source and destination by comparing file sizes and hashes.

It also has options to compare only the size or the hash value. Please note that Rclone neither alters the source nor the destination.

9. Rclone commands are same as normal Linux/Unix commands

Rclone includes cloud equivalents to many traditional Linux and Unix commands such as rsync, cp, mv, mount, ls, ncdu, tree, rm, and cat. If you're already familiar with these commands, Rclone CLI usage would be much easier!

If you're not sure about what will be the actual outcome of a command, you can use the --dry-run option to simulate the commands even before running them. You can read more about simulating commands in this article.

10. Rclone has a WebUI

Rclone was purely a command line program in the earlier days. Fortunately, it does have an experimental Web based GUI now. So if you're not comfortable with CLI, you can perform many Rclone operations graphically via a Web browser.

11. Supports many cloud providers

As of writing this, Rclone can efficiently manage files on 40+ cloud storage providers, such as AWS, Backblaze, Google drive, Dropbox, Mega, NextCloud, ownCloud, Rackspace and many. The complete list of supported providers is given here.

12. Rclone is free, multi-platform and open source!

As stated already, Rclone is a cross-platform application, works well under Linux, Unix, macOS and Windows operating systems.

The source code is freely available in GitHub. You can inspect its code, improve the code, add features, report bugs, port it to other platforms, and contribute in any way possible.

Install Rclone in Linux and Unix

Rclone can be installed in a few ways. You can install Rclone from the official installer script, using the package manager and from the source.

1. Install Rclone using the installer script

Rclone developers have a made an installer script to install both stable rclone or beta version.

To install Rclone on Linux, BSD and macOS systems, run the following command from your Terminal:

$ curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

This script will first check if Rclone is already installed on your system. If it is already installed, it will simply terminate without reinstalling Rclone.

If you want to try the latest beta version, run this command instead:

$ curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash -s beta

Some of you won't prefer directly running the script. If you're one of them, you can try installing Rclone using any one of the methods given below.

2. Install Rclone using package manager

Rclone is packaged for many Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Rclone is available in the default repositories of most Linux distributions, so we can install it using the default package manager as shown below.

To install Rclone in Arch Linux, EndeavourOS and Manjaro Linux, run:

$ sudo pacman -S rclone

Install Rclone in Alpine Linux:

$ sudo apk add rclone

Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop OS:

$ sudo apt install rclone

Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux:

$ sudo dnf install rclone

In RHEL and its clones, you should enable [EPEL] repository before installing Rclone.

$ sudo dnf install epel-release

OpenSUSE:

$ sudo zypper install rclone

3. Install Rclone from source

Make sure you have installed at least Go 1.4 or higher version. follow any one guides to install Go in Linux.

• How To Install Go Language In Linux
• Install Golang In Linux Using Update-golang Script

After installing Go, run the following command to install Rclone from source:

$ go get github.com/rclone/rclone

If you want the latest beta version, run:

$ go get github.com/rclone/rclone@master

4. Install Rclone from pre-compiled binaries

Rclone is also available as precompiled binaries.

Download the latest Rclone binary:

$ curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip

This will download the Rclone zip file in the current directory. Extract the Zip file using command:

$ unzip rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip

This will extract the contents in a directory. Cd into it:

$ cd rclone-*-linux-amd64

Copy Rclone binary file to your $PATH:

$ sudo cp rclone /usr/bin/

Set proper ownership and permissions to the Rclone binary:

$ sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/rclone

$ sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/rclone

Next, install manpage for Rclone by running the following commands one by one.

$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man1

$ sudo cp rclone.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/

$ sudo mandb

5. Install Rclone snap

Rclone is also available as Snap.

To install Rclone snap package, run:

$ sudo snap install rclone --classic

Check Rclone version

Once installed, you can verify the installed Rclone version with command:

$ rclone version

Sample output:

rclone v1.57.0
- os/version: arch 21.2.1 (64 bit)
- os/kernel: 5.10.89-1-MANJARO (x86_64)
- os/type: linux
- os/arch: amd64
- go/version: go1.17.5
- go/linking: dynamic
- go/tags: none

Display Rclone help

We can view the Rclone help section by running the following command:

$ rclone help

Or,

$ rclone -h

This will list the available Rclone commands along with a small description for each command.

If you want to view the help section of a specific rclone command, run:

rclone [command_name] --help

Example:

$ rclone mount help

This will display the help section of rclone mount command.

To view available, global flags, run:

$ rclone help flags

View the supported cloud providers:

$ rclone help backends

You can get the information about a particular backend as shown below.

rclone help backend

Example:

$ rclone help backend mega

This will display the help section for using Mega backend.

Access Rclone Web GUI

The recent Rclone version ships with a simple Web based UI for Rclone. You can access Rclone Web GUI by running the following command from the Terminal:

$ rclone rcd --rc-web-gui

It will open the Rclone dashboard at http://localhost:5572/ URL in your default browser.

You will be asked to enter the username and password when you re-login to Web UI in second time. The default username and password for Rclone WEB UI is admin/password.

We will learn more about Rclone GUI in a separate guide soon.

Conclusion

In this guide, we briefly discussed what is Rclone and some of its important features. We also looked at 5 different ways to install Rclone in various Linux operating systems. Finally, we concluded the article with steps to access the Rclone Web based UI.

In our next articles, we will see how to backup files to various cloud providers such as Google drive, Dropbox and OneDrive etc.

• How To Mount Google Drive Locally Using Rclone In Linux
• How To Mount Dropbox Locally Using Rclone In Linux
• How To Transfer Files Between Dropbox And Google Drive With Rclone In Linux

Resource:

• Rclone Website