Today I am releasing a new tool that lets you work with all forms of rclone crypt in a pure-Python environment without calling (subprocessing) rclone itself. https://github.com/Jwink3101/rclone-crypt-python
From the README:
This tool was written with three goals in mind:
- Proof of concept: I wanted to demonstrate that the rclone crypt format is sufficiently documented to be reimplemented, originally without the help of AI but later with it. I also wanted to demonstrate that this can be a standard used interoperably.
- Real utility: I wanted to work with rclone crypt without having to subprocess rclone each time.
- AI Coding Assistant Playground: When I first made this (Jan. 2026, posted much later), I was new to AI coding assistants, and it was a fun way to learn more.
I have used it in cases where I needed to decrypt 10–100 thousand names very quickly and when I wanted to read encrypted files.
As I make abundantly clear, this is vibe-coded. I understand that may turn people off, and that is fine. I get it. But I found real utility and real peace of mind in the proof of concept, so I wanted to share.
It is:
pip install rclone-crypt-python
But it is called rclone_crypt when used in Python.
Enjoy!