Installing Dropbox on Ubuntu server

Originally posted on 2020-10-23

I like to develop locally and maintain an instance in the cloud for when I have a build that takes a while. The easiest way I've found to do this is to use Dropbox. It's not perfect, and it's not sexy, but it works.

NOTE! When you do this Dropbox may not restart in environments like Cloud9 when the instance is stopped. You should always run dropbox start -i when you log into your instance to make sure it is running.

Installing Dropbox on Ubuntu is a minor pain though. This is how I do it.

Download the Dropbox package

Install the package with dpkg (NOTE: your .deb file name may be different):

sudo dpkg -i dropbox_2020.03.04_amd64.deb

Ubuntu will complain about missing dependencies which can be fixed with this command:

sudo apt --fix-broken -y install

You'll need to install a few extra libraries even if you won't be using the GUI:

sudo apt install -y libglapi-mesa libxcb-glx0 libxcb-dri2-0 libxcb-dri3-0 libxcb-present0 libxcb-sync1 libxshmfence1 libxxf86vm1

Run the Dropbox daemon and it will guide you through the installation:

dropbox start -i

Link it to your account by running the status command and following the provided URL:

$ dropbox status
Starting...
To link this computer to a Dropbox account, visit the following url:
https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link_nonce?nonce=xxx

Then I usually exclude a bunch of stuff I don't want to sync like this:

dropbox exclude add Personal
dropbox exclude add Movies