Dropbox Autostart on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

The Dropbox tool has a dropbox autostart command that claims to automatically start the Dropbox service at login, it doesn't work for me¹ so this is how to achieve the same aim with Systemd.

As an aside, I highly recommend you check out Syncthing as a lightweight self–hosted Dropbox alternative if you are not tied to Dropbox for some reason.

Create a new Systemd user service, note that this will need sudo:

$ cat <<EOF > /usr/lib/systemd/user/dropbox.service
[Unit]
Description=Dropbox file sync service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dropbox start
ExecStop=/usr/bin/dropbox stop

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Reload Systemd files:

$ systemctl --user daemon-reload

Check if the new service is there:

$ systemctl --user list-unit-files -t service | grep dropbox
dropbox.service                     disabled  enabled

Enable and start the new service:

$ systemctl --user enable dropbox
Created symlink /home/rosstimson/.config/systemd/user/multi-user.target.wants/dropbox.service → /usr/lib/systemd/user/dropbox.service.

$ systemctl --user start dropbox

Check all is well:

systemctl --user status dropbox
● dropbox.service - Dropbox file sync service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/dropbox.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2020-06-08 19:35:03 BST; 1h 50min ago
    Process: 1821571 ExecStart=/usr/bin/dropbox start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 1821572 (dropbox)
     CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/dropbox.service
             └─1821572 /home/rosstimson/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-98.4.158/dropbox

Jun 08 19:35:02 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821572]: dropbox: load fq extension '/home/rosstimson/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-l>
Jun 08 19:35:02 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821572]: dropbox: load fq extension '/home/rosstimson/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-l>
Jun 08 19:35:03 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821572]: dropbox: load fq extension '/home/rosstimson/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-l>
Jun 08 19:35:03 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821572]: dropbox: load fq extension '/home/rosstimson/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-l>
Jun 08 19:35:03 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821572]: dropbox: load fq extension '/home/rosstimson/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-l>
Jun 08 19:35:03 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821572]: dropbox: load fq extension '/home/rosstimson/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-l>
Jun 08 19:35:03 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821572]: dropbox: load fq extension '/home/rosstimson/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-l>
Jun 08 19:35:03 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821571]: Dropbox isn't running!
Jun 08 19:35:03 REM-RT-29641 dropbox[1821571]: Done!
Jun 08 19:35:03 REM-RT-29641 systemd[1780]: Started Dropbox file sync service.

$ dropbox status
Up to date

Footnotes