After updating TrueNAS let’s try to run Dropbox client in a Docker container rather than installing directly. Hopefully the container will survive upgrades better.
The janeczku/dropbox is one of the most downloaded images for Dropbox client in Docker. Unfortunately it hasn’t seen an update in nine years. It uses the 64-bit version 11.4.21 of dropboxd from 2016.
You must set env variable DBOX_SKIP_UPDATE to prevent loading the newer version of DB. The current version will not install in the container due to GLIB version issues.
There are several things to setup in the TrueNAS app GUI to get things going: As mentioned in the container overview you will want to set the two environment variables for user id and group ip: DBOX_UID and DBOX_GID. You also need to configure storage. The simplest storage is a Host Path mapped to /dbox/Dropbox and /dbox/.dropbox
Once it starts the log (View Logs ) will report the URL to follow to authorize the link. This is typically in the form https://www.dropbox.com/cli_link_nonce?nonce=5b59dd0928bc08b75a736935bd7d37cd. Pasting the link into a browser and confirming the login is required.
There are a few places to get some status info. From the TrueNAS shell, docker commands will help you see a bit. docker ps -a will list the current containers. docker logs -f containername will tail the container logs. docker top containername will list the current processes for the container.
From the container shell , the dropbox command can display additional information. dropbox status will give a brief status. dropbox filestatus will show the current sync status of the files in the current directory. Additional help on commands can be found using dropbox help or online.
Note: The container shell is accessed from the TrueNAS Apps Gui, select the container and look for Workloads and Containers. There should be three icons for each container – Shell , Volume Mounts and View Logs . In TrueNAS 25.04.2.6 there are bugs that prevent the View Logs function from working well in many cases
Even after all of this the janeczku/dropbox container didn’t seem to be actually syncing anything. It is unclear what all of the issues were but the extreme age of the daemon is surely part of the problem.
There are several newer containers available. One is tiagovdaa/dropbox-docker. It is definitely descended from janeczku/dropbox. Future testing will show if it is more suitable. It is built on version 223.4.4909. The current version from dropbox.com as of December 2025 is 238.4.6075. At the very least, 238.4.6075 does auto install correctly inside the tiagovdaa/dropbox-docker container. It should be noted the language for the container is Portuguese. It appears there is only one volume mount point for this container: dbox. This implies that .dropbox and Dropbox are both children of this mount point.
So for now, it’s back to the previous method of installing dropbox headless and using the Gist to run it as a service as discussed in an earlier post.
A few notes from the earlier post: The first command from the earlier post is su dropbox. This is critical. The .dropbox-dist/dropboxd command will create the Dropbox folder in the home directory of the current user. You will also get the prompt to copy/paste the displayed URL to authenticate to Dropbox as discussed above. When running as a service the /etc/db/dropbox-cli commands will fail UNLESS you are running as the user you defined in dropbox-start.target. The python script checks for the dropbox-pid file in ~/.dropbox.
For services, use systemctl status servicename or journalctl -u servicename for more info. Be aware for the dropbox-start service created above, the dropbox-start.service process completes and exits leaving behind a child running dropbox.