Connecting to OneDrive on Linux

Tags: Faq Linuxtips

I’ve only just discovered this myself, so apologies if I’m late to the game!

What Office365, as used by the University, calls OneDrive is actually “OneDrive for Business” and uses a different network protocol from “normal” OneDrive. The upshot of that is that connecting to the University’s OneDrive from Linux wasn’t possible, except through the web interface. Not exactly convenient.

Today I had reason to run rclone and, out of curiosity, I thought I’d have alook at its OneDrive options. Turns out OneDrive for Business is still supported!

So here’s a crib sheet for connecting to Aber’s OneDrive from Linux.

Install rclone from your distro’s repository.

To configure it:

$ rclone -config

Enter “n” to create a new remote connection.
Enter a name for the connection (e.g. “OneDrive”)
Enter “onedrive” for the storage type.
Just hit Enter when asked for an OAuth Client Id.
Just hit Enter when asked for an OAuth Client Secret.
Enter “n” when asked whether you want to edit advanced config.
Enter “y” for auto config.

rclone will then open your web browser with the Microsoft login page. Enter your Aber credentials (remembering the “@aber.ac.uk” in the username). The next page will ask you to approve rclone for access to your OneDrive. Allow it. You’ll then get a very basic “Success!” page. Switch back to the terminal window.

It should then ask you for the “type” of OneDrive. Select item 1 (onedrive).

Next, it should list the drives it can see for your account. For my account, there was just one, numbered “0” and labelled “OneDrive (business)”. Enter the number of the drive you want to use.

Enter “y” to confirm. It will then show you the (basically gibberish) config it’s going to create. Enter “y” to accept this config, then “q” to quit the configuration interface.

You can then (assuming you named the connection “OneDrive” above):

$ rclone lsd OneDrive:

and it should show you the contents of your OneDrive. If all looks OK, you can try to mount it as a fuse filesystem:

$ mkdir my-aber-onedrive
$ rclone mount --daemon OneDrive: my-aber-onedrive

Your OneDrive contents should then be visible in my-aber-onedrive.

To disconnect from it:

$ fusermount -u my-aber-onedrive

N.B. I have not tested this particularly thoroughly. It seems to work for basic file copies, but I wouldn’t recommend editing “live” data on it. Better to edit a local copy, then copy it back.