Configuring OneDrive access on *NIX machines

Swinburne University uses Microsoft Office365 for Business. As well as being allowed to install and run Office applications on your local Windows Desktop, you are also able to access web-based versions of the Office applicaitons via https://login.microsoftonline.com. This is useful if you need to edit Word/Excel/Powerpoint from your *NIX desktop

Another included feature with Microsoft Office365 for Business is that all University staff get 1TB of storage on the Microsoft OneDrive storage platform. While you may have misgiving about storing files on external servers, these documents can be shared with other Swinburne users and may be convenient for some people. This feature can be particularly useful for any paperwork/documentation you need to prepare for our administrative staff

This page has instructions on how to access your OneDrive files natively from your *NIX machine without having to download/upload via the OneDrive web interface

The tool we will be installing to access OneDrive is Rclone. After configuring Rclone for your OneDrive account, you then have the choice of uploading/downloading individual files, maintaining a local sync of the remote OneDrive (sub-)folder(s), and/or mouting remote OneDrive (sub-)folder(s) to save local disk space

cd /usr/ports/net/rclone

make && make install clean

emerge rclone

rclone config

No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config

Got code
2018/02/09 08:03:18 NOTICE: Found API v2.0 endpoint https://liveswinburneeduau-my.sharepoint.com/_api/v2.0/me
--------------------
[OneDrive]
client_id = 
client_secret = 
token = {"access_token":"XXXXXXX"}
resource_url = https://liveswinburneeduau-my.sharepoint.com/
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y
Current remotes:

Name                 Type
====                 ====
OneDrive             onedrive

e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/c/s/q> q

rclone ls OneDrive:

rclone lsd OneDrive:

Copying files to/from OneDrive

This section is useful if you wish to copy or clone files or directories from your local file system to your OneDrive share or copy/clone files/directories from OneDrive to your local file system "rclone copy" Command As per the RClone documentation (rclone copy), the rclone copy command performs the following tasks: Copy the source to the destination Doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM Doesn't delete files from the destination Consider a sub-folder in your OneDrive account called I4T. In order to make a complete copy of this sub-folder to ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest, issue the command (as a regular user):   rclone copy OneDrive:I4T ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest When you have edited local files and/or created new ones, they can be copied back to OneDrive by issuing the command (as a regular user):   rclone copy ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest OneDrive:I4T You can also specify deeper folder names on OneDrive and to the local directory "rclone sync" Command As per the RClone documentation (rclone sync), the rclone sync command performs the following tasks: Sync the source to the destination, changing the destination only Doesn't transfer unchanged files, testing by size and modification time or MD5SUM Destination is updated to match source, including deleting files if necessary Note the difference in that destination files may be deleted The corresponding commands to sync the files in either direction are:   rclone sync OneDrive:I4T ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest rclone sync ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest OneDrive:I4T This version of the rclone command behaves similarly to the rsync command except with configured remote/cloud based services. Note that you must either manually sync directories and/or schedule a regular cron job to do so. If you would like to automatically keep the folders in sync, you might be more interested in Mounting a remote OneDrive directory

Mounting a remote OneDrive directory

Using this mounts the remote OneDrive folder (or sub-folder) to a local mount point. This is useful in that files from OneDrive are not taking up any local storage space, often useful for laptop deployments. As files are opened, they are downloaded to a local temporary cache and later deleted (from cache) when not accessed for some time Ideally to use this feature you want Rclone v1.39 which supports random read/write access to a locally mounted OneDrive folder. That means you can open and edit non-simple files (such as Word documents) successfully. Older versions are limited to simple text-based editors and/or copying files to and from OneDrive using drag/drop functionality in your window manager Mounting a folder Before mounting your OneDrive folder, you need to create an empty directory to serve as a mountpoint. For this example we will use the folder ~/OneDrive_test. Before continuing, lets create this folder   mkdir ~/OneDrive_test In order to mount your entire OneDrive folder to ~/OneDrive_test, issue the command (as a regular user):   rclone mount OneDrive: ~/OneDrive_test Note that the rclone program will not terminate until you unmount the folder. Alternatively, killing the program will force an unmount. This is a good way to test your mounts prior to automating the process You may now copy files to and from the ~/OneDrive directory and its sub-directories. If you login to OneDrive via a browser, you can see the files being added and removed from OneDrive Mounting a sub-folder For this example, we will create an alternate mountpoint to mount our OneDrive sub-folder. Lets call this directory ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest   mkdir ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest Consider a sub-folder in your OneDrive account called I4T. In order to mount this sub-folder ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest, issue the command (as a regular user):   rclone mount OneDrive:I4T ~/OneDrive_subfoldertest You can also specify deeper folder names on OneDrive and to the local mountpoint. As for mounting the entire OneDrive folder, the rclone program will not terminate until you unmount the folder, killing rclone will force an unmount Parameters to rclone To maximise performance, you might want to use the following command line parameters when mounting a OneDrive (sub-)folder: Parameter Comment --no-modtime Will maximise network performance by not modifying times on OneDrive. The current API will result in backup copies being made on every edit/save if you do not use this option --vfs-cache-mode full Only functions on v1.39 or higher of Rclone. If used, will allow random read/write access to the mounted drive, allowing you to edit files live to the OneDrive folder For further parameters which might be useful, see the rclone online documentation Automating mounts As the rclone mount command is run as a regular user rather than as root, you cannot apply the usual techniques to automatically mount your OneDrive folders. Below is a simple technique that works in the KDE environment, if you are using a different Window Manager, there will be a similar option available Create the following file as ~/bin/rclone_mount.sh   #!/bin/bash RCLONE=`which rclone` RCLONE_PARAMS="--no-modtime" ### Use this RCLONE_PARAMS for rclone >=v1.39 #RCLONE_PARAMS="--vfs-cache-mode full --no-modtime" ${RCLONE} mount ${RLCONE_PARAMS} OneDrive: ~/OneDrive & Change permissions on the script to make it executable   chmod +x ~/bin/rclone_mount.sh Within KDE System Settings --> Startup and Shutdown --> Autostart Click Add Script... Browse for your new script and select it Click OK The script will run (and mount your OneDrive folder upon login If you wish to add more mount-points for OneDrive sub-folders, add extra ${RCLONE} lines to the script above

Other Useful Information

OneDrive and/or rclone provide a number of other useful features you might wish to explore Sharing with other OneDrive users You can share your files/folders with other OneDrive users. The sharing cannot be done via rclone and instead has to be done via the Microsoft web interface Files shared with you are not available via rclone at this stage Other cool things rclone provides a number of other sub-commands outside of copy, sync and mount. To see these commands and their usage see the online documentation Note that the documentation also lists other options that are outside the scope of this document that you might find useful Other data sources rclone supports a number of other data sources aside from OneDrive including Amazon, DropBox, Google Drive, WebDAV and other remote/cloud sources. Once the source is set up using the rclone config command, you can access/copy/sync/mount the remote files in the same manner For information on configuring rclone to support these alternate sources, see the online documentation