Linux

Simple install

Installing rclone on Linux can be done in one step by running the following command:

# Run the official script
sudo -v ; curl https://rclone.org/install.sh | sudo bash

It's important to never run random scripts from the internet, especially if they're prefixed with sudo

sudo gives the script total control over your computer, so always double check what you're doing.

In this case, sudo is needed to move the rclone binary to /usr/bin (which is a protected OS directory), and to set the right permissions on it.

You can view the contents of the installation script here

Manual install

You can also run all steps manually:

# Download the latest release
curl -O https://downloads.rclone.org/rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip

# Unzip the archive. Make sure you have unzip installed
# You can do so with `sudo apt-get install unzip`
unzip rclone-current-linux-amd64.zip

# Open the extracted directory
cd rclone-*-linux-amd64

# Copy the rclone binary to /usr/bin
sudo cp rclone /usr/bin/

# Set permissions
sudo chown root:root /usr/bin/rclone
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/rclone

# Setup manpage for rclone (optional)
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man1
sudo cp rclone.1 /usr/local/share/man/man1/
sudo mandb

Using Rclone UI

If you've installed rclone with Rclone UI, you only have to alias the existing installed app so you can type rclone in the terminal.

alias /location/of/exectuable rclone

This is the preferred method if you're already using the UI, otherwise you'll have 2 different installations and unless you set them up properly they will use different configurations which will be confusing.