Last week, we finished launching the Proton Drive SDK, a shared engine designed to harmonize Proton Drive across all platforms and to bring you the features you need faster. Today, we’re taking the next step: Proton Drive CLI is here, available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
The CLI brings the power of our cloud storage and end-to-end encryption to scripts, backups, and deployment pipelines without the hassle of writing code. It’s built on the same Proton Drive SDK that powers our official Proton Drive client applications, and is fully interoperable with them.
For our developer community: While we are developing our fully-featured Linux app, the CLI already allows you to script a lot of Proton Drive’s key features from your favorite scripting environments (or even schedule jobs with cron). The CLI is intended to complement the Proton Drive application. It’s not a full replacement — for example, only the applications include a full synchronization engine that runs in the background — but rather a way to achieve many goals from a lightweight scripting environment.
What is the CLI?
A command-line interface (CLI) is a program you run from a shell, such as Terminal, PowerShell, or SSH. You pass a command and arguments, it does the job, and exits. Like other Unix command-line tools, you can pipe and script the Proton Drive CLI together with other tools into larger workflows.
The Proton Drive CLI is a single binary you can drop into that world. It supports common Drive operations such as listing folders, uploading and downloading files, trash, sharing, or invitations. Results are displayed in plain, readable text by default — and if you’re building automation on top, you can switch to a machine-friendly format using the --json (or -j) parameter.
How does Proton Drive CLI help?
Until now, using Proton Drive as part of an automated workflow — alongside tools like deployment scripts, backup jobs, cron, or internal runbooks — meant either doing it manually (like opening the app or dragging files) or reverse-engineering Drive’s internals to write custom scripts that were brittle and hard to maintain. The CLI changes that by allowing you to run Proton Drive operations directly from the terminal. It can, for example, upload files after a build finishes, back up a folder on a schedule, invite a reviewer, or check what’s been shared.
This is especially useful when you need a specific action to happen at a specific time, rather than keeping folders continuously in sync, such as publishing files after a release, taking a snapshot of a shared folder before an audit, or revoking access when someone offboards. The CLI runs the operation, tells you if it worked, and exits.
It’s a natural fit for anyone who already works in the terminal and for teams who want their Drive workflows written down as repeatable commands rather than a series of clicks to remember.
Get started with Proton Drive CLI
At launch, the CLI covers the essentials: sign in and out, browse and manage files and folders (including trash), and handle sharing and invitations.
A few typical flows:
proton-drive auth login
# Upload files from local directory to folder in My files
proton-drive filesystem upload ./reports/* /my-files/Reports --conflict-strategy skip
# See who has access, then invite a colleague
proton-drive sharing status /my-files/Reports
proton-drive sharing invite --user [email protected] --role editor --message "Please review reports" /my-files/Reports
# Download to a local backup directory
proton-drive filesystem download /my-files/Reports ./backups
For the full command set and flags, run proton-drive help or proton-drive <command> --help. For example, proton-drive filesystem upload --help.
Find out more about using the Proton Drive CLI.
What comes next
Upcoming additions to the Proton Drive CLI include support for:
- Photos and albums
- Files and folders shared using a secure, public link
- Multi-account support for larger teams and managed service providers
Our long-term goal is to bring everything you can do in the Proton Drive app to the command line.
Download Proton Drive CLI
The fastest way to get started is to download the pre-built binaries for your platform:
On macOS and Linux, you’ll need to make the file executable after downloading (chmod +x proton-drive). Once that’s done, run proton-drive version to confirm the build.
Sign-in happens through your browser — no password on the command line. Your sessions are stored securely by your operating system (Windows Credential Manager, macOS Keychain, or libsecret on Linux).
Build from source
Prefer to build from source? The CLI is implemented in TypeScript, packaged with Bun(new window), and available for download in the Drive SDK repository(new window). After cloning it, you can install the dependencies and build the CLI from the main directory:
cd js/cli
bun install
bun run build
./release/proton-drive auth login
./release/proton-drive filesystem list /my-files
See the CLI README in the repository for more details.
Fair use and rate limits
Proton Drive CLI follows the same fair use policies as all Proton Drive clients. To stay within limits, only upload or download what has actually changed — don’t reupload the same files repeatedly or rewrite entire folders when only a few files are new. Accounts that generate unusually high traffic are temporarily throttled to protect the service for everyone.
Now in your terminal, with the same level of privacy
Proton Drive CLI is available today, and more features will soon follow. Everything you do through the terminal is protected by the same end-to-end encryption as the rest of Proton Drive. Download it, try it, and let us know what you build. And if you’re on Linux: a full-featured desktop client with sync is on its way.
