laziestman / dbxfs

User-space file system for Dropbox

dbxfs

dbxfs allows you to mount your Dropbox folder as if it were a local filesystem. It differs from the official Dropbox client in two main ways:

• Internet connectivity is required for access
• No disk space is required for access, but will cache if disk space is available

dbxfs has been tested on OpenBSD, Linux, and macOS but it should run on any POSIX system that provides a FUSE-compatible library or has the ability to mount SMB shares. Windows support is coming very soon. It runs on non-x86 architectures like ARM. It doesn't require a specific file system.

It is written for Python 3.5+ and is licensed under the GPLv3.

Disclaimer: dbxfs is not affiliated with Dropbox, Inc.

Installation

If you are on Linux, you must install your OS's FUSE library. On Debian/Ubuntu, install the libfuse2 package, on Fedora install fuse.

Run the following command:

$ pip3 install dbxfs

On Arch Linux and derivatives, you can find it in the AUR as dbxfs.

Usage

Use dbxfs like you would use the mount command:

$ dbxfs <mount_point>

To unmount your Dropbox folder on Linux systems, you can use fusermount -u <mount_point>, on all other systems use umount.

You can see the full list of command line options by passing -h to the dbxfs command.

Advanced Access Token Storage

By default dbxfs stores your access token in the system keyring or an encrypted file but you may want to store it in a GPG encrypted file or something else. To do that you must first obtain an access token. You can obtain an access token by creating a personal app on the Dropbox developers app console.

Once you have obtained an app token, encrypt it with the program of your choice and store the result somewhere. After that, you must edit the dbxfs config file. You can find the location of the config file by running the following command:

$ dbxfs --print-default-config-file

The config file is a JSON encoded file. Add the following JSON key to the top-level JSON object in that file:

"access_token_command": ["gpg", "--decrypt", "/path/to/access/token/file.gpg"]

Adapt it to a decryption program of your choice. This configuration works great for storing the access token using a OpenPGP card.

Contact

Rian Hunter @cejetvole