Mac

Simple install

Installing rclone on macOS 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:

# Navigate to your Downloads folder
cd ~/Downloads

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

# Unzip the archive
unzip -a rclone-current-osx-amd64.zip

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

# Copy the rclone binary to /usr/local/bin
# Note: you can run mkdir even if the directory already exists
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
sudo mv rclone /usr/local/bin/

You can now delete the downloaded zip and the extracted folder from your Downloads.

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 ~/Library/"Application Support"/com.rclone.ui/rclone 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.