rclone/docs/content/install.md

title	description	date
Install	Rclone Installation	2018-08-28

Install

Rclone is a Go program and comes as a single binary file.

Quickstart

• Download the relevant binary.
• Extract the rclone or rclone.exe binary from the archive
• Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs for more details.

See below for some expanded Linux / macOS instructions.

See the Usage section of the docs for how to use rclone, or run rclone -h.

Script installation

To install rclone on Linux/macOS/BSD systems, run:

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

For beta installation, run:

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

Note that this script checks the version of rclone installed first and won't re-download if not needed.

Linux installation from precompiled binary

Fetch and unpack

curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
unzip rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
cd rclone-*-linux-amd64

Copy binary file

sudo cp rclone /usr/bin/
sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/rclone
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/rclone

Install manpage

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man1
sudo cp rclone.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
sudo mandb 

Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs for more details.

rclone config

macOS installation with brew

brew install rclone

macOS installation from precompiled binary, using curl

To avoid problems with macOS gatekeeper enforcing the binary to be signed and notarized it is enough to download with curl.

Download the latest version of rclone.

cd && curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

Unzip the download and cd to the extracted folder.

unzip -a rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip && cd rclone-*-osx-amd64

Move rclone to your $PATH. You will be prompted for your password.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
sudo mv rclone /usr/local/bin/

(the mkdir command is safe to run, even if the directory already exists).

Remove the leftover files.

cd .. && rm -rf rclone-*-osx-amd64 rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

Run rclone config to setup. See rclone config docs for more details.

rclone config

macOS installation from precompiled binary, using a web browser

When downloading a binary with a web browser, the browser will set the macOS gatekeeper quarantine attribute. Starting from Catalina, when attempting to run rclone, a pop-up will appear saying:

“rclone” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.
macOS cannot verify that this app is free from malware.

The simplest fix is to run

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine rclone

Install with docker

The rclone maintains a docker image for rclone. These images are autobuilt by docker hub from the rclone source based on a minimal Alpine linux image.

The :latest tag will always point to the latest stable release. You can use the :beta tag to get the latest build from master. You can also use version tags, eg :1.49.1, :1.49 or :1.

$ docker pull rclone/rclone:latest
latest: Pulling from rclone/rclone
Digest: sha256:0e0ced72671989bb837fea8e88578b3fc48371aa45d209663683e24cfdaa0e11
...
$ docker run --rm rclone/rclone:latest version
rclone v1.49.1
- os/arch: linux/amd64
- go version: go1.12.9

There are a few command line options to consider when starting an rclone Docker container from the rclone image.

• You need to mount the host rclone config dir at /config/rclone into the Docker container. Due to the fact that rclone updates tokens inside its config file, and that the update process involves a file rename, you need to mount the whole host rclone config dir, not just the single host rclone config file.

• You need to mount a host data dir at /data into the Docker container.

• By default, the rclone binary inside a Docker container runs with UID=0 (root). As a result, all files created in a run will have UID=0. If your config and data files reside on the host with a non-root UID:GID, you need to pass these on the container start command line.

• It is possible to use rclone mount inside a userspace Docker container, and expose the resulting fuse mount to the host. The exact docker run options to do that might vary slightly between hosts. See, e.g. the discussion in this thread.

  You also need to mount the host /etc/passwd and /etc/group for fuse to work inside the container.

Here are some commands tested on an Ubuntu 18.04.3 host:

# config on host at ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf
# data on host at ~/data

# make sure the config is ok by listing the remotes
docker run --rm \
    --volume ~/.config/rclone:/config/rclone \
    --volume ~/data:/data:shared \
    --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
    rclone/rclone \
    listremotes

# perform mount inside Docker container, expose result to host
mkdir -p ~/data/mount
docker run --rm \
    --volume ~/.config/rclone:/config/rclone \
    --volume ~/data:/data:shared \
    --user $(id -u):$(id -g) \
    --volume /etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro --volume /etc/group:/etc/group:ro \
    --device /dev/fuse --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --security-opt apparmor:unconfined \
    rclone/rclone \
    mount dropbox:Photos /data/mount &
ls ~/data/mount
kill %1

Install from source

Make sure you have at least Go 1.7 installed. Download go if necessary. The latest release is recommended. Then

git clone https://github.com/rclone/rclone.git
cd rclone
go build
./rclone version

You can also build and install rclone in the GOPATH (which defaults to ~/go) with:

go get -u -v github.com/rclone/rclone

and this will build the binary in $GOPATH/bin (~/go/bin/rclone by default) after downloading the source to $GOPATH/src/github.com/rclone/rclone (~/go/src/github.com/rclone/rclone by default).

Installation with Ansible

This can be done with Stefan Weichinger's ansible role.

Instructions

1. git clone https://github.com/stefangweichinger/ansible-rclone.git into your local roles-directory
2. add the role to the hosts you want rclone installed to:

    - hosts: rclone-hosts
      roles:
          - rclone