RcloneTray: Easily Mount Rclone Remotes On Demand Using A GUI

RcloneTray is a GUI for Rclone, the "rsync for cloud storage" command line tool, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Using this Electron tray application, you'll be able to quickly mount Rclone remotes, open the mount location using your default file manager, and perform other operations.

Also see Rclone Browser (updated fork) for a more complete Rclone GUI.

Rclone can synchronize files from your filesystem from/to cloud storage services like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Nextcloud, Yandex Disk, Dropbox, Amazon Drive and S3, Mega, pCloud, and others (and having WebDAV, FTP and SFTP support), as well as directly between cloud storage services. It also supports mounting these cloud storage services so you can access your files using desktop applications.

RcloneTray lists all your Rclone remotes in its tray menu, each remote having a separate submenu that varies with each storage service.

You have the option of mounting any remote you've previously configured using Rclone, from the RcloneTray menu, be it some cloud storage provider, WebDAV, SFTP, etc., as well as opening it using your default file manager. For some remotes (Google Drive and Dropbox for example) though, it may say "Open in Finder" even though it's running on Linux; this is just a display bug and it does open the location using your default Linux file manager. To indicate when a remote is mounted, the circle shown to the left of the remote name fills up.

On some remotes (this option is available for Google Drive and Dropbox remotes, but not for OneDrive for example) you also have the option of downloading the whole remote contents to your filesystem for offline use, and uploading all the files copied to the folder mapped to the remote cloud storage server.

From the RcloneTray menu you also get quick access to Rclone's ncdu (not to be confused with ncdu itself, this is only for rclone), an interactive, text-based user interface for the console, which allows the navigation of a remote, showing the used space. This command line tool is missing quite a few features right now, but it's still quite useful already. To enable the Console Browser option (this is how Rclone's ncdu is shown in the RcloneTray menu), you'll need to open the RcloneTray settings, go to the NCDU tab and enable it from there.

Other RcloneTray features:

Option to create a new "bookmark" (this is called "remote" in Rclone) which lists all available providers, and then shows all the options available for that provider. You may also use this to edit existing remotes/providers
Optional serving via HTTP, FTP, Restic and WebDAV (needs to be enabled in the RcloneTray preferences). This seems broken in RcloneTray when using recent rclone versions (bug reported)
Comes with bundled Rclone binary, and it uses this by default, but it has an option to disable the bundled Rclone and use the system one. You can download Rclone from its website
Specify custom Rclone configuration file path and args

The RcloneTray "Create new Bookmark" dialog, which can also be used to edit an existing "bookmark" (called "remote" in Rclone)

I personally find it easier to add a new remote to Rclone from the command line (run rclone config in a console and follow the setup wizard - for example see how to configure and mount Microsoft OneDrive using Rclone) than using the RcloneTray option to add a new bookmark. What's more, the authorization link did not open automatically in my web browser when I tried to setup a new remote/provider using the RcloneTray new bookmark option.

RcloneTray was created as a free alternative to Mountain Duck, a tray application for mounting your server or cloud storage as a disk in Finder on macOS and File Explorer on Windows, using Cyberduck for the synchronization work. RcloneTray is free and open source software, and it does allow mounting cloud storages easily from a tray menu not only on Windows and macOS, but also on Linux, but it lacks some important Mountain Duck features. This includes synchronizing files to your local disk when opened, select which files and folders to have offline (RcloneTray allows downloading all files only), file manager integration, and more.

This should be obvious, but I guess I should still mention it - to work, RcloneTray needs a working system tray. On Gnome Shell you can use the AppIndicator Support extension (installed and enabled by default on Ubuntu).

Download and usage

The downloads page has RcloneTray binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux (AppImage and DEB). Users running Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS or any other Linux distribution based on Debian or Ubuntu should use the DEB package.

To run the RcloneTray AppImage binary you'll need to make it executable: right click -> Properties -> Permissions -> Allow executing file as program (or similar; this depends on your file manager). Now if your desktop environment / file manager allows it, double click the rclonetray-1.0.0-x86_64.AppImage file to run it. On desktop environments which don't allow double clicking AppImage files to run them, open a terminal and drag'n'drop the rclonetray-1.0.0-x86_64.AppImage file onto the terminal window, then press Enter. You may also type ./rclonetray-1.0.0-x86_64.AppImage from the folder where the AppImage is located in.

Mapping a local directory to a remote host

As soon as you start RcloneTray it should show your existing remotes (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.) in its menu, but to be able to mount them, make sure they have a local directory mapping. You can check / add this from RcloneTray: remote submenu -> Edit -> Mappings -> Local Path (remember to click Save after mapping a local path to a remote).

It should be noted that the option to run RcloneTray to startup doesn't seem to work on Linux. On my Ubuntu 19.04 desktop, the option of launching the application on startup failed to launch the app (or even get the option to remain enabled) using both the DEB and AppImage binaries (and this is expected for the AppImage but not for the DEB package). It's still possible to add it to your startup applications.

Add it to startup on desktops that have a Startup Applications tool (or equivalent) by using the following as command for the package installed as DEB: /opt/RcloneTray/rclonetray, and the exact path to the binary (including the filename) if you're using the AppImage.

You can also add it to startup manually, by creating a file called rclonetray.desktop in ~/.config/autostart/ with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=PATH-TO-EXECUTABLE
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name=Rclone Tray

Replacing PATH-TO-EXECUTABLE with the path to the RcloneTray executable (/opt/RcloneTray/rclonetray if installed from DEB, or wherever you've saved the AppImage if that's what you want to use).