Installation

An app bundle is currently provided only for macOS. On other platforms, you can either install the Docker image or the Python package from PyPI. When installing using pip, it is recommended in most cases to install inside a new virtual environment:

$ python3 -m venv maestral-venv
$ source maestral-venv/bin/activate
(maestral-venv)$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade maestral

If you intend to use the graphical user interface, you also need to specify the GUI option during installation or upgrade. This will install the maestral-qt frontend and PyQt5 on Linux and maestral-cocoa on macOS:

(maestral-venv)$  python3 -m pip install --upgrade 'maestral[gui]'

Please refer to the download page for links and a comparison of installation sizes.

System requirements

The basic requirements to run the daemon are:

• Mac OS X High Sierra or higher
• Linux 2.6 or higher
• For the Python package: Python 3.7 or higher

GUI

The Linux GUI requires PyQt 5.9 or higher. While the GUI will run with Qt 5.9, support of some platform features such as high-dpi scaling will be limited. Qt 5.12 or higher is recommended for newer platforms.

To install the GUI, you can either specify the gui extra when install Maestral

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade maestral[gui]

or directly pip-install maestral-qt / maestral-cocoa .

Since the GUI is a system tray / menu bar app, it does require a desktop environment with a system tray. This is no longer the case in Gnome 2.6+, although Ubuntu ships with its own system tray extension. For Gnome desktop environments that do not provide a system tray, the gnome-shell-extension-appindicator is recommended.

systemd journal support

Logging to the systemd journal requires python-systemd which is currently not a dependency but will be installed when specifying the ‘syslog’ extra in the installation command:

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade maestral[syslog]

Note however that a pip installation will build python-systemd from source and requires gcc, systemd headers and python headers and may therefore fail on some systems. It is recommended to install python-systemd from your distribution’s package manager instead:

On Fedora/RHEL/CentOS:

dnf install python3-systemd

On Debian/Ubuntu/Mint:

apt-get install python3-systemd

Docker image

A Docker image is available for x86 and arm64 platforms. You can do everything that you supposed to do in the command line, except running the GUI. It can be installed with:

$ docker pull maestraldbx/maestral

For the first run, get access to the shell within the Docker container

$ docker run -it -v /mnt/dropbox:/dropbox maestraldbx/maestral:latest ash

where /mnt/dropbox is the directory which contains the Dropbox directory and Maestral’s configuration. Maestral runs with UID 1000, make sure that the user owns /mnt/dropbox and the contents within (chown -R 1000 /mnt/dropbox).

Then run Maestral’s setup

$ maestral start

This will prompt you to authorize Maestral to access your Dropbox account and establish your Dropbox folder at /dropbox/Dropbox (Maestral).

You can then start the Maestral daemon by starting the container

$ docker run \
  -d \
  --name maestral \
  --rm \
  -v /mnt/dropbox:/dropbox \
  maestraldbx/maestral:latest

You can check the sync status of the daemon by running docker exec -it maestral maestral status.

To step into the Maestral container use docker exec -it maestral ash. To list the logs of the container use docker logs maestral. To get the build info of a running container: docker inspect maestral | jq ".[].Config.Labels".