mc

mc

mc provides a command-line client to interact with Amazon S3 and S3-compatible object storage services (e.g. Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, MinIO, etc.) It offers a Unix-like command based interface to interact with S3, implementing commands like ls, cat, cp, find etc.

It provides the following commands:

  alias      manage server credentials in configuration file
  anonymous  manage anonymous access to buckets and objects
  cp         copy objects
  cat        display object contents
  diff       list differences in object name, size, and date between two buckets
  du         summarize disk usage recursively
  encrypt    manage bucket encryption config
  event      manage object notifications
  find       search for objects
  get        get s3 object to local
  head       display first 'n' lines of an object
  ilm        manage bucket lifecycle
  legalhold  manage legal hold for object(s)
  ls         list buckets and objects
  mb         make a bucket
  mv         move objects
  mirror     synchronize object(s) to a remote site
  pipe       stream STDIN to an object
  put        upload an object to a bucket
  rm         remove object(s)
  retention  set retention for object(s)
  rb         remove a bucket
  sql        run sql queries on objects
  stat       show object metadata
  share      generate URL for temporary access to an object
  tree       list buckets and objects in a tree format
  tag        manage tags for bucket and object(s)
  undo       undo PUT/DELETE operations
  version    manage bucket versioning
  watch      listen for object notification events

It is based on the last open-source version of the Minio client, but is actively maintained and tested with a wide variety of S3-compatible services. See compatibility for more information.

Installation

To install the mc client, head to the releases and download a binary for the platform of your choice.

On Linux/MacOS/FreeBSD, you can install the mc binary to /usr/local/bin using the following command:

archive="mc-$(uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')-$(uname -m | sed -e 's/^x86_64$/amd64/' -e 's/^aarch64$/arm64/' -e 's/^armv.*$/arm/').tar.gz" && tmpdir=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fSL "https://github.com/supriyo-biswas/mc/releases/latest/download/$archive" -o "$tmpdir/$archive" && tar -xzf "$tmpdir/$archive" -C "$tmpdir" && chmod +x "$tmpdir/mc" && sudo mv "$tmpdir/mc" /usr/local/bin/mc && rm -rf "$tmpdir"

On Windows, you can install the mc.exe binary to C:\Windows\System32 (already on PATH) using the following command in an elevated (Administrator) PowerShell:

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://github.com/supriyo-biswas/mc/releases/latest/download/mc-windows-amd64.zip -OutFile mc.zip; Expand-Archive -Force mc.zip -DestinationPath .; Move-Item -Force mc.exe C:\Windows\System32\mc.exe; Remove-Item mc.zip

Now, type mc in the terminal to see if it works.

Usage

To begin, start by adding an object storage service to mc's configuration by using the mc alias set command.

You'll need an access key and secret to get started. For example, if you want to access Amazon S3, create an access key in IAM and add it using the following command:

$ mc alias set s3 https://s3.amazonaws.com
Enter Access key: ...
Enter Secret key: ...
Added `s3` successfully.

Similarly, for Google Cloud Storage, you can create an access key in Google Cloud and add it using the following command:

mc alias set gcs https://storage.googleapis.com

Once you've done this, you can use the mc commands to manage your object storage, like so (replace s3 with gcs or play or another alias that you've set):

# list your buckets
mc ls s3
# create a bucket
mc mb s3/my-bucket
# copy a file to a bucket
mc cp my-file.txt s3/my-bucket
# list the contents of a bucket
mc ls s3/my-bucket

Shell autocompletions

In case you are using bash, zsh or fish. Shell completion is embedded by default in mc, to install auto-completion use mc --autocompletion. Restart the shell, mc will auto-complete commands as shown below.

mc <TAB>
config   diff     find     ls       mirror   policy   session  sql      watch
cat      cp       event    head     mb       pipe     rm       share    stat     version

Compatibility

mc aims to be compatible with Amazon S3 and S3-compatible services. Every commit is tested in CI against the following self-hosted S3-compatible services:

• RustFS
• Garage
• SeaweedFS
• VersityGW
• Aistor

If you've faced compatibility issues with S3 compatible services please open an issue.

There are a few differences between mc and the original Minio client:

• MinIO-only commands such as admin, support and license are not included as we target broader S3 compatibility instead of being an administration tool for MinIO.
• Local-only operations such as listing local files or deleting local files are not supported, as the author has found it only leads to mistakes such as inadvertently copying or deleting local files. Local↔remote and remote↔remote transfers and operations are supported.

License

mc is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 license that can be found in the LICENSE file, which is the same license as the original MinIO client.