TangoRangers.com's Blog

A while back, Dropbox dropped a lot of support for Linux, such as dropping XFS and EncFS, which broke a lot of users. It ended up causing problems for me at work because we use CentOS and all of the sudden, Glibc is now too old to even run dropbox headless. Eventually I gave up on Dropbox and started just using it for simple things through the web browser, but then I discovered rclone.

Using rclone, I was not only able to view everything in Dropbox (which by the way, my company uses Okta for single sign-on, and this still worked) but I was able to mount Dropbox to my local file system! For those of you familiar with webdav, this works in a similar way. When you “mount” Dropbox it doesn’t download anything like when you use the app. It all works online. Put files into the mounted folder, and they will upload.

Getting started is pretty easy, the following commands were taken from https://rclone.org/dropbox/.

rclone config
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
q) Quit config
e/n/d/q> n
name> remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
[snip]
XX / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
[snip]
Storage> dropbox
Dropbox App Key - leave blank normally.
app_key>
Dropbox App Secret - leave blank normally.
app_secret>
Edit advanced config? (y/n)
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> n
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine
y) Yes
n) No
y/n> Y
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: http://127.0.0.1:53682/auth
Log in and authorize rclone for access
Waiting for code...
Got code
--------------------
[dropbox]
type = dropbox
token = {"access_token":"BIG LONG TOKEN HIDDEN","token_type":"bearer","expiry":"0001-01-01T00:00:00Z"}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d> y
Current remotes:
 
Name                 Type
====                 ====
dropbox              dropbox
 
e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
r) Rename remote
c) Copy remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/c/s/q>

So I kind of cheated here, but basically once you are getting setup a new link will your browser, log into Dropbox and it will ask for rclone to be able to access Dropbox. Give access and your done. It is pretty easy. Now I named my dropbox dropbox, maybe dropbox wasn’t the best name to differentiate it, but oh well.

Once you get to this point you can do something like

rclone ls dropbox:

Which will get you a nice list of files you currently have in your dropbox.

Now for the fun part… mount.

There is a ton of information over here at https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/ but really, all you need to do is

rclone mount dropbox:/ /path/to/mount/point &

You must background the process to get your shell back. The mount is only active while that program is running and it does not appear in your list of mounted drives in Linux. So running something like df will not show the mount point, but what ever user you are logged in as (or that ran the command) will see files when looking in that directory.