Installation

Requirements

• A Linux desktop (Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch). The engine is Unix-only — the control plane uses Unix domain sockets — but Linux is the only supported and tested platform: keyring session reuse (secret-tool/libsecret), the desktop app, and the native packaging are all Linux-specific.
• A Rust toolchain with edition 2024 support (Rust 1.85 or newer) to build from source.
• The proton-drive CLI, installed, authenticated, and on your PATH (see below).
• For the desktop app: the usual Tauri Linux build deps — webkit2gtk-4.1, libsoup-3.0, gtk3, and glib2 development packages, plus libappindicator for the system tray.

Prerequisite: the proton-drive CLI

The engine relies on Proton’s own proton-drive CLI: every remote file operation (list, upload, download, delete) shells out to it, and change detection reads Proton’s volume-event stream directly over HTTPS, authenticated by reusing that tool’s keyring session. Install and authenticate it first, following its own documentation, then confirm it works:

proton-drive filesystem list --json /Drive/RemoteFolder

If that command fails, the daemon will fail the same way. If proton-drive is not on your PATH, point the daemon at it explicitly with --proton-cli /path/to/proton-drive.

Note

proton-drive is not available in Linux distribution repositories, so it can’t be a package dependency. Install it separately and keep it logged in — it is, for now, the owner of your Proton session. If the CLI’s session expires, the daemon falls back to snapshot scans until the CLI refreshes.

Build from source

Clone the repository and build both engine binaries:

git clone https://github.com/osirison/proton-drive-sync-engine.git
cd proton-drive-sync-engine
cargo build --release --bins

This produces target/release/proton-syncd and target/release/proton-sync. To install them into your Cargo bin directory:

cargo install --path .

Build the desktop app

The desktop app is a Tauri workspace member. With the Tauri Linux build deps installed:

cargo build --release -p proton-sync-gui

The resulting proton-sync-gui binary is the desktop client. See the Desktop app overview for what it does.

Validate a source checkout

The full contributor validation suite:

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features -- -D warnings
cargo test --all-targets --all-features

clippy runs with -D warnings, so warnings fail the build in CI. See Development for focused test commands.

Native packages

Packaging trees live under packaging/ for RPM (Fedora/COPR), deb (Debian/Ubuntu), and an Arch PKGBUILD (AUR). Each installs the three binaries, a systemd user unit at /usr/lib/systemd/user/proton-syncd.service, the freedesktop launcher/icon/AppStream metadata, and the Nautilus/Nemo file-manager emblem extensions (split into optional subpackages on RPM and deb; bundled in the main package on Arch, with the Python bindings as optional dependencies).

See Native packages for the per-distro build and install steps.

Note

The native packages deliberately do not declare proton-drive as a dependency (it isn’t in any distro repo). Install and log into it separately after installing the package.

Next

• Quick start — preview a plan and run your first sync.
• Running as a service — install the systemd user unit.