v1.40

rclone serve restic

Serve the remote for restic's REST API.

Synopsis

Run a basic web server to serve a remote over restic's REST backend API over HTTP. This allows restic to use rclone as a data storage mechanism for cloud providers that restic does not support directly.

Restic is a command-line program for doing backups.

The server will log errors. Use -v to see access logs.

--bwlimit will be respected for file transfers. Use --stats to control the stats printing.

Setting up rclone for use by restic

First set up a remote for your chosen cloud provider.

Once you have set up the remote, check it is working with, for example "rclone lsd remote:". You may have called the remote something other than "remote:" - just substitute whatever you called it in the following instructions.

Now start the rclone restic server

rclone serve restic -v remote:backup

Where you can replace "backup" in the above by whatever path in the remote you wish to use.

By default this will serve on "localhost:8080" you can change this with use of the --addr flag.

You might wish to start this server on boot.

Adding --cache-objects=false will cause rclone to stop caching objects returned from the List call. Caching is normally desirable as it speeds up downloading objects, saves transactions and uses very little memory.

Setting up restic to use rclone

Now you can follow the restic instructions on setting up restic.

Note that you will need restic 0.8.2 or later to interoperate with rclone.

For the example above you will want to use "http://localhost:8080/" as the URL for the REST server.

For example:

$ export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=rest:http://localhost:8080/
$ export RESTIC_PASSWORD=yourpassword
$ restic init
created restic backend 8b1a4b56ae at rest:http://localhost:8080/

Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access
the repository. Losing your password means that your data is
irrecoverably lost.
$ restic backup /path/to/files/to/backup
scan [/path/to/files/to/backup]
scanned 189 directories, 312 files in 0:00
[0:00] 100.00%  38.128 MiB / 38.128 MiB  501 / 501 items  0 errors  ETA 0:00
duration: 0:00
snapshot 45c8fdd8 saved

Multiple repositories

Note that you can use the endpoint to host multiple repositories. Do this by adding a directory name or path after the URL. Note that these must end with /. Eg

$ export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=rest:http://localhost:8080/user1repo/
# backup user1 stuff
$ export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=rest:http://localhost:8080/user2repo/
# backup user2 stuff

Private repositories

The--private-repos flag can be used to limit users to repositories starting with a path of /<username>/.

Server options

Use --addr to specify which IP address and port the server should listen on, eg --addr 1.2.3.4:8000 or --addr :8080 to listen to all IPs. By default it only listens on localhost. You can use port :0 to let the OS choose an available port.

If you set --addr to listen on a public or LAN accessible IP address then using Authentication is advised - see the next section for info.

You can use a unix socket by setting the url to unix:///path/to/socket or just by using an absolute path name. Note that unix sockets bypass the authentication - this is expected to be done with file system permissions.

--addr may be repeated to listen on multiple IPs/ports/sockets. Socket activation, described further below, can also be used to accomplish the same.

--server-read-timeout and --server-write-timeout can be used to control the timeouts on the server. Note that this is the total time for a transfer.

--max-header-bytes controls the maximum number of bytes the server will accept in the HTTP header.

--baseurl controls the URL prefix that rclone serves from. By default rclone will serve from the root. If you used --baseurl "/rclone" then rclone would serve from a URL starting with "/rclone/". This is useful if you wish to proxy rclone serve. Rclone automatically inserts leading and trailing "/" on --baseurl, so --baseurl "rclone", --baseurl "/rclone" and --baseurl "/rclone/" are all treated identically.

TLS (SSL)

By default this will serve over http. If you want you can serve over https. You will need to supply the --cert and --key flags. If you wish to do client side certificate validation then you will need to supply --client-ca also.

--cert should be a either a PEM encoded certificate or a concatenation of that with the CA certificate. --key should be the PEM encoded private key and --client-ca should be the PEM encoded client certificate authority certificate.

--min-tls-version is minimum TLS version that is acceptable. Valid values are "tls1.0", "tls1.1", "tls1.2" and "tls1.3" (default "tls1.0").

Socket activation

Instead of the listening addresses specified above, rclone will listen to all FDs passed by the service manager, if any (and ignore any arguments passed by --addr`).

This allows rclone to be a socket-activated service. It can be configured with .socket and .service unit files as described in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.socket.html

Socket activation can be tested ad-hoc with the systemd-socket-activatecommand

   systemd-socket-activate -l 8000 -- rclone serve

This will socket-activate rclone on the first connection to port 8000 over TCP.

Authentication

By default this will serve files without needing a login.

You can either use an htpasswd file which can take lots of users, or set a single username and password with the --user and --pass flags.

If no static users are configured by either of the above methods, and client certificates are required by the --client-ca flag passed to the server, the client certificate common name will be considered as the username.

Use --htpasswd /path/to/htpasswd to provide an htpasswd file. This is in standard apache format and supports MD5, SHA1 and BCrypt for basic authentication. Bcrypt is recommended.

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.

Use --realm to set the authentication realm.

Use --salt to change the password hashing salt from the default.

rclone serve restic remote:path [flags]

Options

      --addr stringArray                IPaddress:Port, :Port or [unix://]/path/to/socket to bind server to (default [127.0.0.1:8080])
      --allow-origin string             Origin which cross-domain request (CORS) can be executed from
      --append-only                     Disallow deletion of repository data
      --baseurl string                  Prefix for URLs - leave blank for root
      --cache-objects                   Cache listed objects (default true)
      --cert string                     TLS PEM key (concatenation of certificate and CA certificate)
      --client-ca string                Client certificate authority to verify clients with
  -h, --help                            help for restic
      --htpasswd string                 A htpasswd file - if not provided no authentication is done
      --key string                      TLS PEM Private key
      --max-header-bytes int            Maximum size of request header (default 4096)
      --min-tls-version string          Minimum TLS version that is acceptable (default "tls1.0")
      --pass string                     Password for authentication
      --private-repos                   Users can only access their private repo
      --realm string                    Realm for authentication
      --salt string                     Password hashing salt (default "dlPL2MqE")
      --server-read-timeout Duration    Timeout for server reading data (default 1h0m0s)
      --server-write-timeout Duration   Timeout for server writing data (default 1h0m0s)
      --stdio                           Run an HTTP2 server on stdin/stdout
      --user string                     User name for authentication

See the global flags page for global options not listed here.