Installing and setting up Rclone

Reviewed on 03 July 2023 • Published on 25 August 2021

Rclone is a command-line tool that can be used to manage your cloud storage. It communicates with any S3-compatible cloud storage provider as well as other storage platforms.

Follow the instructions given in the official Rclone documentation here to install Rclone.

For example, on Linux:

Connect to your server as root via SSH.

Then, download and install Rclone with the following sequence of commands:

wget https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
apt install zip
unzip rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip
cd rclone*linux-amd64/
mv rclone /usr/bin/

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization

Configuring Rclone

Run the following command to begin the Rclone configuration:

rclone config

If you do not have any existing remotes, the following output displays:

2021/01/18 16:03:28 NOTICE: Config file "/root/.config/rclone/rclone.conf" not found - using defaults
No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config

If you have previously configured Rclone you may see a slightly different output. However, that does not affect the following steps.

Type n to make a new remote. You are then prompted to type a name - here we type remote-sw-paris:

n/s/q> n
name> remote-sw-paris

The following output displays:

Type of storage to configure.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / 1Fichier
  \ "fichier"
2 / Alias for an existing remote
  \ "alias"
3 / Amazon Drive
  \ "amazon cloud drive"
4 / Amazon S3 Compliant Storage Provider (AWS, Alibaba, Ceph, Digital Ocean, Dreamhost, IBM COS, Minio, Tencent COS, etc)
  \ "s3"
[...]
Storage>

Type s3 and hit enter to confirm this storage type. The following output displays:

Choose your S3 provider.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3
  \ "AWS"
2 / Alibaba Cloud Object Storage System (OSS) formerly Aliyun
  \ "Alibaba"
3 / Ceph Object Storage
  \ "Ceph"
4 / Digital Ocean Spaces
  \ "DigitalOcean"
5 / Dreamhost DreamObjects
  \ "Dreamhost"
6 / IBM COS S3
  \ "IBMCOS"
7 / Minio Object Storage
  \ "Minio"
8 / Netease Object Storage (NOS)
  \ "Netease"
9 / Scaleway Object Storage
  \ "Scaleway"
10 / StackPath Object Storage
  \ "StackPath"
11 / Tencent Cloud Object Storage (COS)
  \ "TencentCOS"
12 / Wasabi Object Storage
  \ "Wasabi"
13 / Any other S3 compatible provider
  \ "Other"

Type Scaleway and hit enter to confirm this S3 provider. The following output displays:

Get AWS credentials from runtime (environment variables or EC2/ECS meta data if no env vars).
Only applies if access_key_id and secret_access_key is blank.
Enter a boolean value (true or false). Press Enter for the default ("false").
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / Enter AWS credentials in the next step
  \ "false"
2 / Get AWS credentials from the environment (env vars or IAM)
  \ "true"
env_auth>

Type false and hit enter, to be able to enter your credentials in the next step. The following output displays:

AWS Access Key ID.
Leave blank for anonymous access or runtime credentials.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
access_key_id>

Enter your API access key and hit enter. The following output displays:
```
AWS Secret Access Key (password)
Leave blank for anonymous access or runtime credentials.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
secret_access_key>
```

Enter your API secret key and hit enter. The following output displays:

Region to connect to.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  \ "nl-ams"
2 / Paris, France
  \ "fr-par"
region>

Enter your chosen region and hit enter. Here we choose fr-par. The following output displays:

Endpoint for Scaleway Object Storage.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / Amsterdam Endpoint
  \ "s3.nl-ams.scw.cloud"
2 / Paris Endpoint
  \ "s3.fr-par.scw.cloud"
endpoint>

Enter your chosen endpoint and hit enter. Here we choose s3.fr-par.scw.cloud. The following output displays:

Canned ACL used when creating buckets and storing or copying objects.
This ACL is used for creating objects and if bucket_acl isn't set, for creating buckets too.
For more info visit https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/acl-overview.html#canned-acl
Note that this ACL is applied when server side copying objects as S3
doesn't copy the ACL from the source but rather writes a fresh one.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / Owner gets FULL_CONTROL. No one else has access rights (default).
  \ "private"
2 / Owner gets FULL_CONTROL. The AllUsers group gets READ access.
  \ "public-read"
  / Owner gets FULL_CONTROL. The AllUsers group gets READ and WRITE access.
3 | Granting this on a bucket is generally not recommended.
  \ "public-read-write"
4 / Owner gets FULL_CONTROL. The AuthenticatedUsers group gets READ access.
  \ "authenticated-read"
  / Object owner gets FULL_CONTROL. Bucket owner gets READ access.
5 | If you specify this canned ACL when creating a bucket, Amazon S3 ignores it.
  \ "bucket-owner-read"
  / Both the object owner and the bucket owner get FULL_CONTROL over the object.
6 | If you specify this canned ACL when creating a bucket, Amazon S3 ignores it.
  \ "bucket-owner-full-control"
acl>

Enter your chosen ACL and hit enter. Here we choose private (1). The following output displays:

The storage class to use when storing new objects in S3.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
1 / Default
  \ ""
2 / The Standard class for any upload; suitable for on-demand content like streaming or CDN.
  \ "STANDARD"
3 / Archived storage; prices are lower, but it needs to be restored first to be accessed.
  \ "GLACIER"
storage_class>
4 / One Zone Infrequent Access storage class
  \ "ONEZONE_IA"

Enter your chosen storage class and hit enter. Here we choose STANDARD (2). The following output displays:

Edit advanced config? (y/n)
y) Yes
n) No (default)
y/n>

Type n and hit enter. A summary of your config displays:

Remote config
--------------------
[remote-sw-paris]
type = s3
provider = Scaleway
env_auth = false
access_key_id = <ACCESS-KEY>
secret_access_key = <SECRET-KEY>
region = fr-par
endpoint = s3.fr-par.scw.cloud
acl = private
storage_class = STANDARD
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK (default)
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d>

Type y to confirm that this remote config is OK, and hit enter.

The following output displays:

Current remotes:
Name                 Type
====                 ====
tuto                 s3
e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/c/s/q> q

Type q to quit the config, and hit enter.

Note
If you want to be able to transfer data to or from a bucket in a different region to the one you just set up, repeat steps 1-14 again to set up a new remote in the required region. Simply enter the required region at steps 7 and 8. Similarly, you may wish to set up a new remote for a different Object Storage provider.

For further information, refer to the official RClone S3 Object Storage Documentation. Official documentation also exists for other storage backends.