In this blog post, I want to discuss one of my recent attempts to create a simple one-liner Linux Dropbox client using only free and open-source components, including rclone, entr, and systemd.

Context

Recently, the proprietary Dropbox Linux client dropped support for all Linux file systems except unencrypted ext4. And, my home directory is “unfortunately” encrypted.

In early December, the proprietary Dropbox Linux client I have been using stopped working. It logged me out, and prompted me to choose a different sync folder on a “supported file system”.

By the way, I run Ubuntu bionic on a two-year-old Thinkpad t460s.

How I use Dropbox

I am a heavy Org mode user. I take notes in plain text, and my use case of Dropbox is simply “continuously backing up my notes while I type”.

If you are also into data infrastructure, my use case is very similar to “asynchronous single-master replication”. All writes go through my Thinkpad, the master. The remote Dropbox folder is just a read-only follower that I occasionally “issue read-only queries” to, or used as a backup to construct a new master when the current master fails or gets stolen.

Nevertheless, this replication setup has saved my life multiple times. I still remember, very vividly, that my Thinkpad couldn’t boot during the exam season at the end of my sophomore year. Since I continuously replicated all my notes to Dropbox, I didn’t lose any data and I was able to view my latest notes on my mom’s Macbook. Thanks mom!

My failed attempts

When the Dropbox client stopped working, my main focus was to find another similarly feature-rich remote storage client for Linux. I also wouldn’t mind migrating to another storage back-end, such as Google Drive or AWS S3. Some of the other options I considered include overGrive and insync.

However, I concluded that these solutions are way too feature-rich, and not well-suited for my use case.

For example, these clients are modelled as mounting a remote file system onto your file system. They try really hard to abstract the remote file systems away by making them look and feel like local file systems. They typically implement two-way syncing, automatically mapping remote file types to Linux file types, etc.

I don’t need this level of abstraction. I just need something simple that allows me to back up my notes to the cloud continuously while I type. In addition, the abstraction also makes it harder to set up and debug. Not to mention that most of these “feature-rich” clients are proprietary.

rclone

I ran into rclone and realized that it is exactly what I was looking for. rclone is simple but powerful. It is very similar to the rsync tool, but for “cloud storage”.

For example, it not only takes care of fault tolerance (integrity checks), efficient synchronization algorithms, etc., but also provides a simple CRUD interface to interact with popular cloud storage services, including Amazon S3, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

The following command will make the remote directory org identical with the local directory /home/lpan/org

ORG_DIR=/home/lpan/org REMOTE=dropbox rclone sync $ORG_DIR $REMOTE:org

entr

entr is a command runner that leverages the inotify API. It basically allows you to run a command triggered by file changes, without polling the file system.

One of its common usages is to rebuild the project when any of the source file changes.

entr takes a list of absolute paths from stdin , and then it will execute a command, passed in as an ARG , when any of the watched file changes.

WORKDIR=/path/to/myproject find $WORKDIR | grep "\.cpp$" | entr make

The one-liner script

Now we learned about rclone and entr . The final script turned out to be very simple. To remind you about my use case of Dropbox, all I want to do is to continuously replicate my local Org file changes to Dropbox. Therefore, we just need to use entr to watch the files that we want to replicate, and use rclone to “sync” them to the remote storage.

The final script ( /home/lpan/sync_dropbox.sh ) looks like the following:

#!/bin/bash ORG_DIR=/home/lpan/org REMOTE=dropbox find $ORG_DIR | entr -r rclone sync -v $ORG_DIR $REMOTE:org

Edit 2020-05-13: If you want to watch new files being added to the directory, you can use the -d flag provided by entr with an infinite loop, as shown below:

#!/bin/bash ORG_DIR=/home/lpan/org REMOTE=dropbox while true; do find $ORG_DIR | entr -rd rclone sync -v $ORG_DIR $REMOTE:org end

Make the script into a Daemon

A Daemon is “just a computer program that runs as a background process”. We make this script into a “background process” because we want it to continuously sync local file changes to the remote file system in the background.

systemd provides an interface for us to manage daemon processes.

I created a Dropbox Service in ~/.config/systemd/user/dropbox.service .

[Unit] Description=Dropbox Daemon [Service] ExecStart=/home/lpan/sync_dropbox.sh Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=default.target

Then, you can manage the daemon with the following commands

# reload the service file systemctl --user daemon-reload # start the daemon systemctl --user start dropbox.service # start the daemon on login systemctl --user enable dropbox.service # inspect the status of the daemon systemctl --user status dropbox.service

Conclusion

In this post, I discussed how I apply the UNIX philosophy and use a set of free and open-source tools to replace the proprietary & deprecated Dropbox client. We talked about rclone and entr . I also showed you how I make this process a Daemon and manage it using systemd .

I want to remind you that the key idea of this post is simplicity. We want to solve our simple problems with simple solutions. My use case of Dropbox is very simple. And this is why one simple line of shell script would be a better solution than using a feature-rich, and possibly proprietary remote storage client.

Thanks so much for reading! I really hope you enjoy this post. Got a better way to do the same job, or know how to extend the script for another use case? Let me know in the comment section below!

Edit 2018-12-24: This article has been discussed on Hacker News and r/linux.