Copy folder contents to another location on VPS

[chrisburton]

Hey, guys. Some of you may already know that I have Dropbox installed on my VPS. I am trying to get the contents inside a folder to sync to another location on my VPS.

E.g.

• Dropbox is installed in home/chrisburton/Dropbox/
• Website content is in home/chrisburton/Dropbox/Website/

I would like the contents inside /Website/ to go into var/www/html/ but watch home/chrisburton/Dropbox/Website/ for updates to any file and sync to var/www/html/ if there are any changes.

Could someone help me with that?

[nixnerd]

Chris,
I don’t use Dropbox but do you think there might be an OFFICIAL soltuion to this? Like one that is unique to Dropbox? What I’m saying is… do you think it’s a matter of getting the Dropbox settings correct? Or are you looking for anything that works?

[James Burton]

Hello Chris,

What I think you could do is create a script to check the timestamp of the dropbox folder and if the number is higher than the timestamp in the website folder then copy the new files over to the website from dropbox.

You can setup a script as a cron job every 6 hours to check the version.

James

[chrisburton]

@Joe_Temp There’s this but I’m not sure what I’m doing.

[nixnerd]

Ohhhh nice! That’s exactly what you want. Let me read it for potential pitfalls. BTW… everything written in this article SHOULD work on your Mac. Let me check it out.

[nixnerd]

Hey Chris… what does it currently do now? When you put a file in home/chrisburton/Dropbox/Website/, where does it sync to?

[Alen]

There are two things you could do.

Easiest is to change the Apache config and set the document root to that of DropBox/Website, so Apache will just serve it from there. No need to do anything else.

Second. You could system link it. Basically make a shortcut that points to another location. In your case, you would need to remove the var/www/html folder first (obviously make sure you’re not deleting anything important inside). Then create a system link or shortcut named html that points to your DropBox folder.

sudo rm -R /var/www/html
sudo ln -s /var/www/html /home/chrisburton/Dropbox/Website/

No need to setup CRON, since you’re making changes locally, upload to DropBox that is synced with the VPS making site reflect those updates automagically.

[Alen]

Stops the service

$ dropbox stop

Copy dropbox.bd that is inside ~/.dropbox/ folder, and rename it to dropbox.db.backup

$ cp ~/.dropbox/dropbox.db dropbox.db.backup

Download Python Script

$ wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/119154/permalink/dropboxdir.py

Make script executable

$ chmod +x dropboxdir.py

Move the folder to location of your choice /foo/bar

$ mv ~/Dropbox /foo/bar

Run the Downloaded Script with --setfolder flag

$ ./dropboxdir --setfolder=/foo/bar

Start the service back up

$ dropbox start

[nixnerd]

@alenabdula Just out of curiosity… since I don’t use Dropbox:

What directory is the link Chris posted talking about? The target (to be watched) directory? Or the sync directory? It seemed like it was really only talking about moving one directory and that’s what I didn’t understand.

[nixnerd]

What directory is the link Chris posted talking about? The target (to be watched) directory? Or the sync directory? It seemed like it was really only talking about moving one directory and that’s what I didn’t understand.

Aaaaand you just answered that. Sync directory.

[Alen]

Chris I wouldn’t change the actual location of the Dropbox folder. Use the Apache document root or system link. If you’re only doing this because you wish to serve your site from Dropbox.

[chrisburton]

@AlenAbdula

dropbox stop

All I get is unrecognized service or command not found

[Alen]

Can you run sudo /sbin/service dropbox stop

[chrisburton]

dropbox: unrecognized service

[Alen]

What about ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd stop.

How did you initially start the service when you installed it?

[Author]

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