This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to mount Box online storage on Ubuntu 20.04 | 18.04.
Box.com offers online storage services for businesses and individuals. Box service helps keep your files safe with cloud-native security capabilities like granular access controls, watermarking, and classification.
As of this writing, Box did not offer any native Linux client that works with their platform. However, a secure WebDAV protocol allows you to mount your online storage easily via HTTPS.
Once mounted, you can securely access your Box content via WebDAV protocol, find every file you need, edit like any local file, and save it automatically to the cloud.
To get started with mounting Box files on Ubuntu, follow the steps below:
Mount Box via File Manager
The File Manager is the quickest way to mount your Box storage on an Ubuntu desktop.
Ubuntu file manager has built-in support to access remote servers over multiple protocols such as FTP, NFS, Samba, SSH, AppleTalk, and WebDAV.
To mount your Box storage, open the Ubuntu file manager and click on the menu + Other Locations
Then type in the Box WebDAV address:
davs://dav.box.com/dav
After that, click Connect.
That should prompt you to enter your Box account username and password to sign in.
Login and begin managing your Box content.
You can add the Box mount to your favorite by right-clicking the Box link on the left and selecting Add to Favorite.
That’s now to mount Box on Ubuntu file explorer.
Mount Box via Command Line
If you’re running a Linux server and want to mount your Box storage via the terminal, use the steps below:
First, run the commands below to install the required packages
sudo apt install davfs2
When prompted, select Yes if you want unprivileged users to mount WebDAV resources.
Create your Box mount point on the server. This is the location you’ll access your Box content.
mkdir ~/Box
We will create it in our home folder and call it Box.
Box does not support file locks. To get this to work, you’ll need to turn off file locks in the davfs2 configuration file located at /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf.
Run the commands below to open the config file.
sudo nano /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf
Then turn off the lock file by editing the file and changing the highlighted value to 0.
trust_server_cert
# clientcert
# secrets ~/.davfs2/secrets # user config file only
# ask_auth 1
use_locks 0
# lock_owner <user-name>
# lock_timeout 1800 # seconds
# lock_refresh 60 # secoSave the ext.
After that, run the commands below to add your account to the davfs2 group.
sudo usermod -a -G davfs2 $USER
You may have to log out and back in or reboot the machine after running the commands above.
Next, edit the /etc/fstab file and add a Box mount point entry.
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Then add the line below to the end of the file and save.
https://dav.box.com/dav /home/richard/Box davfs rw,user,noauto 0 0Save the file and exit.
After adding the entry, run the commands below to mount your Box content.
mount Box
You’ll be prompted to enter your Box account details.
richard@ubuntu2004:~$ mount Box Please enter the username to authenticate with server https://dav.box.com/dav or hit enter for none. Username: [email protected] Please enter the password to authenticate user [email protected] with server https://dav.box.com/dav or hit enter for none. Password:
Now go to ~/Box to get your content.
That’s it!
Conclusion:
This post showed you how to mount Box content on Ubuntu. If you find any error above, use the form below to report it.
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