hidrive-manager

A command line tool for IONOS / STRATO HiDrive. It talks WebDAV directly, so it works without the official desktop client, without an API key and without waiting for an app registration.

hidrive ls -l /users/home-1234
hidrive put ~/Music/Album "/Musik Backup"
hidrive sync ~/Documents /users/home-1234/Documents --delete
hidrive get "/Musik Backup/Album" -o ~/Downloads

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Features

• ls, tree, stat, du, find for browsing a 1 TB drive from the terminal
• put / get for files and whole directories, parallel transfers, progress bar
• sync in both directions with dry run, --delete and glob excludes
• Resumable downloads (.part files, HTTP Range)
• Skips files that are already up to date (size and modification time)
• mkdir, rm, mv, cp executed on the server, no round trip through your machine
• cat for piping a remote file into other tools
• --json output for ls, stat, du, find
• Password stored in the OS keychain (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, Secret Service on Linux), never in a file
• Environment variables for scripts and CI: HIDRIVE_USERNAME, HIDRIVE_PASSWORD, HIDRIVE_URL
• Two dependencies: requests and keyring

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Requirements

• Python 3.10 or later
• A HiDrive account with WebDAV enabled: in the HiDrive web UI go to Settings → Access rights and protocols and switch WebDAV on. WebDAV is included in every HiDrive plan.
• Works with classic HiDrive (IONOS and STRATO). HiDrive Next (the Nextcloud based product) also speaks WebDAV; set --url to its WebDAV endpoint. Not tested yet.

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Install

git clone https://github.com/nzrbits/hidrive-manager
cd hidrive-manager
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate          # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install .

or straight from GitHub with pipx or uv:

pipx install git+https://github.com/nzrbits/hidrive-manager
uv tool install git+https://github.com/nzrbits/hidrive-manager

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First run

hidrive login

You are asked for your HiDrive username (for IONOS accounts something like home-1234) and password. The tool verifies the credentials against the WebDAV endpoint, stores the username in ~/.config/hidrive-manager/config.json and the password in the system keychain.

hidrive status

prints the configuration and confirms the connection.

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Commands

Command	What it does
login / logout	store or remove credentials
status	show config and test the connection
ls [-l] [-R] [--json] PATH	list a directory
tree [-L N] PATH	directory tree
stat [--json] PATH	metadata of one entry
put [-j N] [-n] [--exclude GLOB] [--overwrite newer|always|never] LOCAL... REMOTE_DIR	upload
get [-j N] [-n] [-o DIR] [--overwrite ...] REMOTE...	download
sync [--pull] [--delete] [-y] [-n] [--exclude GLOB] LOCAL REMOTE	mirror a directory
cat PATH	stream a file to stdout
mkdir PATH...	create directories including parents
rm [-r] [-f] [-y] PATH...	delete
mv [-f] SRC DST	move or rename on the server
cp [-f] SRC DST	copy on the server
du [-s] [--json] PATH	size per child, sorted
find [--name GLOB] [--type f|d] [--min-size 100M] [-l] [--json] PATH	search
config [--set KEY=VALUE]	show or change url, timeout, jobs, username

Global flags: -q (quiet, no progress bar), -v (print every action), -u USER, --url URL.

Remote paths are absolute paths on the drive. On IONOS accounts your personal folder is /users/<username>; shared or top level folders sit next to it, for example /Musik Backup.

Examples

# What is taking space?
hidrive du /users/home-1234

# Upload a folder with 8 parallel connections, skip macOS junk
hidrive put -j 8 --exclude .DS_Store ~/Pictures/2026 /users/home-1234/Pictures

# Look before you sync
hidrive sync -n --delete ~/Projects /users/home-1234/Projects

# Mirror the drive back to disk (pull)
hidrive sync --pull "/Musik Backup" ~/Music/Backup

# All FLAC files above 100 MB as JSON
hidrive find / --name '*.flac' --min-size 100M --json

# Pipe a remote file
hidrive cat /users/home-1234/notes/todo.md | less

How "up to date" is decided

put, get and sync compare size and modification time. A file is transferred when the size differs or when the source is newer than the destination (2 seconds tolerance). HiDrive does not accept a client supplied modification time on upload, so after an upload the remote timestamp is the upload time. That is fine for the next run: same size and the local file is not newer, so it is skipped. On download the local file gets the remote timestamp.

--overwrite always forces the transfer, --overwrite never only adds missing files.

Scripting

export HIDRIVE_USERNAME=home-1234
export HIDRIVE_PASSWORD=...        # e.g. from a secret manager
hidrive -q sync --delete -y /srv/backup /users/home-1234/backup
echo $?   # 0 ok, 1 error, 2 not configured, 3 finished with failed transfers

rm and sync --delete refuse to delete without -y when stdin is not a terminal.

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Configuration

~/.config/hidrive-manager/config.json (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hidrive-manager/config.json, or the file named in HIDRIVE_CONFIG):

{
  "username": "home-1234",
  "url": "https://webdav.hidrive.ionos.com",
  "timeout": 60,
  "jobs": 4
}

STRATO customers use https://webdav.hidrive.strato.com.

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Limits and known gaps

• WebDAV has no partial upload. An interrupted upload starts over (downloads resume).
• Share links, thumbnails and the trash are only available through the HiDrive REST API, which needs a registered OAuth client. Not implemented.
• Large files: uploads of several GB work over WebDAV, but HiDrive's per request limit is not documented. Please open an issue if a size fails reproducibly.
• No mount. If you need a drive letter, macOS Finder and Windows Explorer can mount the WebDAV URL directly, or use rclone.

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Development

pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest

The tests run against an in-memory WebDAV server (tests/fakedav.py) that mimics HiDrive's Apache mod_dav responses, so no account is needed. scripts/smoke.sh runs every command against a real account inside a throwaway folder and cleans up afterwards.

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License

MIT, see LICENSE.