There are a lot of old instructions on how to install Dropbox on a headless linux server, most of them outdated. I had to recently go through this pain myself so i’ve compiled a set of updated instructions to make life easier for you.
These were performed on a clean Debian 6 install, so you may already have some of the dependencies required, along with the Dropbox client v1.4.
Installing Dropbox on a Debian server without a GUI.
- Install the following packages with aptitude to satisfy the dependencies of Dropbox.
python-gtk2 libatk1.0-0 libcairo2 libglib2.0-0 libgtk2.0-0 libpango1.0-0
There’ll be a bunch more packages you’ll have to install, just go ahead and install them too. - Download and install the appropriate 64 or 32 bit .deb file from here.
- Run “dropbox start -i” as your user (not root), this will download the dropbox daemon and setup the .dropbox and .dropbox-dist directories in your home directory.
- Run ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
- It’ll spit out a URL. Paste this URL into your browser to link Dropbox to your system.
- Hit CTRL-C to interrupt Dropbox.
- For some reason dropbox will not die, so kill it with “killall dropbox”.
- Download this sysinit script into /etc/init.d/ and modify the DROPBOX_USERS line at the top to your user or users. Rename the file to just “dropbox”.
- chmod +x /etc/init.d/dropbox
- update-rc.d dropbox defaults
- You can now start Dropbox with /etc/init.d/dropbox start
Your main Dropbox directory will be ~/Dropbox. The command line interface is the command “dropbox” unsurprisingly.
If you have any problems with these instructions, please let me know and i’ll do what I can to assist.