CLI Cloud Storage Manager Rclone 1.56.0 Adds New Serve Docker Command, Reworked Config, New librclone C Library Cloud console news

Rclone, a free and open source command line cloud storage sync tool, was updated to version 1.56.0, which includes some important new features. There’s a new backend, new commands including Docker serve, a reworked configuration system, and there’s also a new librclone C library.

Rclone is a command line cloud storage manager. You can use it to manage multiple cloud storage providers from the command line, which allows using the cloud equivalents of Unix commands like rsync, cp, mv, mount, ls, ncdu, tree, and so on.

You can use it to sync files and directories from and to cloud storage services (including directly between cloud storages) with optional encryption, mount a remote storage locally using its FUSE support, serve local or remote files over HTTP, WebDav, FTP, SFTP or DLNA, and more.

As for supported cloud storage providers, Rclone supports over 40 services, including Google Drive, Amazon Drive and S3, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Yandex Disk, NextCloud, Box, pCloud, and more. It runs on Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, *BSD and Solaris.

While this is a command line tool, it does come with an experimental web GUI. There’s also a third-party Rclone Browser GUI.

The latest Rclone 1.56.0 comes with some new commands, including a serve docker command that implements the Docker volume plugin API allowing Docker to use Rclone as a data storage mechanism for various cloud providers, and a checksum command for checking files in the source against a SUM file (MD5, SHA1, etc).

Another change worth mentioning that comes with the latest Rclone 1.56.0 is a reworked configuration system. This has been done, so it can be used non-interactively via cli and RC API. It’s worth noting that this change affects all backends, so it may cause breakages with previous configurations! If something doesn’t work, please file a bug report.

This Rclone release also includes librclone which exports the Rclone RC (remote control API) as a C library, allowing developers to integrate Rclone features into their applications. This even supports Android and Gomobile.

Other changes in Rclone 1.56.0 include:

  • New backend for Uptobox
  • VFS: Add cache reset for --vfs-cache-max-size handling at cache poll interval
  • Local: Always use readlink to read symlink size for better compatibility
  • Drive: Switch to the Drives API for looking up shared drives
  • Dropbox: Add --dropbox-batch-mode flag to speed up uploading
  • SFTP: Fix performance regression by re-enabling concurrent writes
  • HTTP: Replace httplib with lib/http
  • Many other changes which you can see here

Download Rclone


The download page includes binaries for Windows, Linux (DEB, RPM and generic binary), macOS and BSD, as well as a generic script to automatically download Rclone and set everything up. You’ll also want to read the Rclone documentation.