Windows WSL2 and Dropbox

wsl-dropbox.md

This was only tested on Fedora 35 with systemd but should work on any WSL distribution that uses systemd.

Install the Dropbox headless client:

$ cd ~ && wget -O - "https://www.dropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86_64" | tar xzf -

Install the Dropbox manager script into your ~/bin folder:

$ wget -O ~/bin/dropbox https://www.dropbox.com/download?dl=packages/dropbox.py
$ chmod +x ~/bin/dropbox

Create a systemd unit to start Dropbox automatically (somehow dropbox autostart has no effect):

$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/systemd/user
$ cat > ~/.local/share/systemd/user/dropbox.service <<EOF
[Unit]
Description=Dropbox Daemon
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/home/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
ExecStop=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

$ systemctl enable --user dropbox
$ systemctl start --user dropbox

Additionally, configure the download/upload limit:

$ dropbox throttle unlimited unlimited

This helped me a lot!

systemctl start --user dropbx is a typo of systemctl start --user dropbox.

I tried to do this, and it previously worked, i think the MS team did some changes to wsl or the kernel and broke something in the process, i can only start dropbox under wsl v1, i installed the v6 kernel, but it didn't seem to have any effect.

I just end up with this:

the only solution i have is to run wsl under v1, but the catch is this version doesn't support systemd at all, if anyone has a fix please let me now