shellbro/dropbox

Dropbox in a container.

Rationale

Running Dropbox in a container is a solution for running Dropbox on older Linux systems. At the end of 2018 Dropbox dropped support for Linux operating systems that use glibc < 2.19 and this affects CentOS 7 which ships with glibc 2.17.

This container image is based on CentOS 8 which runs with newer glibc 2.28.

Docker Hub

Image uses automated build service offered by Docker Hub.

https://hub.docker.com/r/shellbro/dropbox/

Quick start (store files inside a container)

$ docker run --name=dropbox --restart=always -d shellbro/dropbox

After container is created click on the URL from $ docker logs dropbox to link your Dropbox account.

Quick start (store files on the host)

Note: replace /home/shellbro/Dropbox example path with the host path you would like to use.

$ docker run --name=dropbox --restart=always -d -v /home/shellbro/Dropbox:/home/dropbox-user/Dropbox shellbro/dropbox

Check Dropbox status

$ docker exec -it -e "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" dropbox /home/dropbox-user/bin/dropbox status

You might want to put the following shell alias in your ~/.bashrc file:

alias dropbox='docker exec -it -e "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" dropbox /home/dropbox-user/bin/dropbox'

and simply use it like:

$ dropbox status

or

$ dropbox version

Auto-update issue

Unfortunately, it happens that Dropbox tries to update itself inside a container when it detects new version is available but that process fails when running inside a container. You can check that this is the case by running dropbox status or docker logs dropbox command. The only workaround I know about at the moment is to follow the procedure of manual Dropbox update from the following section after each Dropbox release (roughly every 2 weeks).

Manual update

When new Dropbox version is released this image gets updated. To update your setup just run:

$ docker stop dropbox && docker rm dropbox && docker pull shellbro/dropbox

and start your container from the new image like in the Quick start section.