Rclone on gcp via vnc, webbrowser, rtray nirvana

I applaud all of your who are involved in the development of rclone. You are much more talented than I ever hope to be. I recognized a long time ago that I'm not a developer! However, I'm not to bad at bringing together various applications to make for a solution.

This morning I managed to get rclone running on a Google Cloud Platform Ubuntu 16.04 virtual machine, installed the Ubuntu Gnome Desktop and VNC server for remote access, and now I can access the webgui from it directly. I'm using the beta version that supports the WebGui interface on the local GCP Virtual Machine. I have also installed rclone web Browser on my Windows 10 computer and am able to use it remotely to access rclone running within the Google Cloud Platform.

I want to start working on an offshoot of what you are all building by creating a version of this called rclone appliance for Google Cloud Platform. The first version will be a clone Linux Ubuntu image with all of the stuff installed and ready for final configuration. The second version will be a Container distribution. As we are a Google Cloud Partner we will then promote this solution into the Google Cloud Marketplace.

I'm new here so I do not want to step on anyone's toes or be considered as someone stealing others code. So if there are rule of engagement for bringing together a number of these tools into one solution and then offering it for free within the Google Cloud Marketplace please do let me know.

Thank you everyone for all of your help.

Sounds very interesting - look forward to hearing about your progress :smiley:

Rclone is licenced under the very permissive MIT licence so you are quite entitled to do this.

Excellent. Working with TheStigma to help me get a POC put together.

My hope is to generate donations back to the project by offering a deployable version on the Google Cloud Marketplace.

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Windows Server Core working well with rclone and various GUI tools. I'm using Windows Central Admin to manage the server remotely. Rclone is used to mount a drive. Explorer++ is used to look and the local and Google Cloud Storage locations. I used it to easily copy from the D: drive to the P: drive with upload speeds of 45mbps from my local ISP.

Still a lot more work to do before it is ready for the Google Cloud Marketplace.

The one thing I need to figure out the most right now is how to configure a Linux rclone implementation so that it is remotely accessible via the rclone web-gui interace. I would like to avoid installing anything on the local machine (like rclone browser which is really good btw). I want to be able to deploy the solution as an OVF or Image and immediately have access to it via a remote run web browser.

You need to pass --rc-addr :5572 to get rclone to bind to all interfaces then you can connect to it remotely. If you are connecting it straight to the internet make sure you set authentication!

Then visit http://remote_machine_ip:5572/ in the browser.

You'll need the other flags to get the rcd to work - see

The Google Cloud Platform rclone appliance virtual machine is moving forward. We now have rclone mount automatically upon startup of the virtual machine Windows Server Core and Linux Ubuntu. We have added Explorer++ and Google Chrome web browser to make working locally much easier.

We are now starting to work on creating GCP Deployment Manager deploy-able implementations of these Windows and Linux images.

This is not my ideal solution. The ideal solution is being able to remote into the rclone virtual machine via a remote desktop via a web browser to the rclone rcd service. This needs to be a preconfigured and running feature upon boot up of the rclone appliance. That is a GCP VPC network port forwarding thing I need to figure out.

The main issue however is not with the port forwarding but rather when the solution is deployed via Google Cloud Deployment Manager that it creates a Project and Firewall Rules to allow the rclone appliance to be accessed remotely. That is all part of what GCP Deployment Manager does when it dynamically creates its environment for the new deployment.

And thanks to TheStigma for all his work on making this happen.

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We now have a fully bootable Windows Server Core VM with rclone mounting drive R: to a GCP cloud storage bucket as well as rclone rcd starting up the web gui server in the background. For ease of access I also included Explorer++ and the Google Chrome web browser as part of the package. Now that it is all setup and running I can use the Windows Admin Center to manage the box entirely remotely from its public IP address including RDP into it. It is not 100% the solution I want but it is getting close. Last item on the agenda remains Port Forwarding with GCP to allow a remote web browser to access the rclone web gui via the GCP VM public IP!

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Very happy to report that we now have Rclone Browser working on the Windows Server Core implementation for the Google Cloud Platform. I will now turn to doing the same on the Linux Ubuntu rclone all in one solution.

All of you Devs have done a great job. My goal in releasing this open source file sync solution on the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace is to bring some attention to this project and the great work you are all doing. Google is a very open source friendly environment and this should generate some donations to the project community.

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Do you want to create a page in the rclone wiki about it?

We can definitely do that, but we still have some work ahead of us until we have something like a finalized version1, so that would make sense to do near the end.

On a related note - I think it would generally be a good idea to have a category for "rclone related software" where we can generally just link other projects (with a small description) that implement rclone in useful ways - be they GUI extensions, or just a collection of scripts for a spesific purpose. This project would fit nicely in there, and I've run across several other projects that seem like they would be beneficial to let the community know about.

Just as example, rclone explorer, which I just stumbled upon recently:


Having rclone on android seems pretty notable.

Probably a good idea to have some minimum of vetting and maintenance to prevent subpar or very outdated software from clogging it up, but this is probably something the community here can mostly handle itself :slight_smile:

Maybe once we have successfully published the solution to the Google Cloud Marketplace.

We now have a fully self contained Ubuntu rclone implementation with rclone browser and rclone webgui up and running.

Still no port forwarding working yet but that will come.

There is a third party tool page in the wiki which gets used like that. https://github.com/rclone/rclone/wiki/Third-Party-Integrations-with-rclone

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