"serve" to Another Computer

rclone serve sharing

By default, rclone serve http and rclone serve webdav will open a server only accessible to localhost (the machine that rclone is running on). This is intentional, as rclone does not have any built-in encryption or authentication for these modes. There are a couple of workarounds however. With only rclone, you can overwrite the default, and have a non-authenticated, non-encrypted default shared over your network. With another webserver ( such as caddy), you can create a proxy that allows some basic authentication and encryption functionalities.

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Option 1: Use only rclone.

WARNING: This will make your remote accessible to everyone on your network, possibly the entire internet without a firewall.

NOTE: See Option 2 for a subjectively "better" solution.

If you want access control then you can use a simple username and password:

      --pass string                        Password for authentication.
      --realm string                       realm for authentication (default "rclone")
      --user string                        User name for authentication.

Or you can set up an htpasswd file. This is in standard apache format and supports MD5, SHA1 and BCrypt for basic authentication. Bcrypt is recommended.

      --htpasswd string                    htpasswd file - if not provided no authentication is done

To create an htpasswd file:

touch htpasswd
htpasswd -B htpasswd user
htpasswd -B htpasswd anotherUser
The password file can be updated while rclone is running.

And if you want to set up a TLS certificate use these options:

      --cert string                        SSL PEM key (concatenation of certificate and CA certificate)
      --key string                         SSL PEM Private key

Or if you want to use client authentication:

      --client-ca string                   Client certificate authority to verify clients with

HTTP

Assuming your current command is: rclone serve http remote:

You can change it to: rclone serve http --addr :8080 remote:

Your remote will now be accessible from http://yourip:8080

Webdav

Assuming your current command is: rclone serve webdav remote:

You can change it to: rclone serve webdav --addr :8081 remote:

Your remote will now be accessible on your ip on port 8081

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Option 2: Use an additional webserver on top of rclone ( Here we use caddy ):

NOTE: Caddy which is also written in go, and should be portable to all of the places rclone is.

NOTE: This Configuration will create a "self-signed" SSL certificate, which will cause clients to have to bypass warnings to connect. If you have a signed SSL certificate, see here to see how you'll have to modify your Caddyfile.

1. Get Caddy: caddyserver.com
2. Create a file named Caddyfile in your current directory, and for contents, enter (replace myaddress with your ip or your FQDN ( Fully Qualified Domain Name. Assuming you have your router/firewall forwarding port 443 through to your ip, this will allow accessing your remote through the web), and 127.0.0.1:8080 with 127.0.0.1:8081 if you're using rclone serve webdav. NOTE Replace $USER and $PASSWORD!):

myaddress:443
proxy / 127.0.0.1:8080
basicauth / $USER $PASSWORD
tls self_signed

3. Run rclone serve http myremote: or rclone serve webdav myremote:. This will create the server hosting your remote, but it will only be accessible from your own computer without encryption or authentication.
4. Run caddy from the directory where you put Caddyfile. This will relay remote https or webdav requests, to rclone, requiring authentication, then encrypting them.
5. You should now be able to connect over https or webdav, on myaddress:443

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