Table of Contents
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File syncing should happen in the background and should require as little user interaction as possible. To simplify this, the GUI includes an option to automatically start on login. On macOS, this will create an appropriate launchd service which will show up as a "Login item" in System Preferences. On Linux, this will create an appropriate ".desktop" entry.
The CLI includes an equivalent command maestral autostart which will create the appropriate systemd (Linux) or launchd (macOS) entry to start the Maestral daemon with the selected config on login. If used together with the GUI's "Start on login" option, the GUI will simply attach itself to the started daemon.
systemd integration
Maestral plays nicely with systemd. This means that it will notify systemd of its status while it is running and send log output to the journal. The latter requires the installation of python-systemd which is not a default requirement. If you install Maestral with the syslog option pip3 install maestral[syslog], this dependency will be automatically installed for you. 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
The maestral autostart command will try its best to find the path of the Maestral console script, depending on the user’s installation, but it may fail in some circumstances. In this case, you can follow the instructions below to manually create a systemd service.
To run the Maestral with your own systemd configuration, you can adapt the template below and save it at "~/.config/systemd/user/maestral.service". /usr/bin/maestral should be replaced with the path to the command line script, as returned by which maestral.
[Unit]
Description = Maestral daemon
Documentation = https://github.com/SamSchott/maestral-dropbox/wiki
[Service]
Type = notify
NotifyAccess = exec
ExecStart = /usr/bin/maestral start -f
ExecStop = /usr/bin/maestral stop
ExecStopPost=/usr/bin/env bash -c "if [ ${SERVICE_RESULT} != success ];\
then notify-send Maestral 'Daemon failed'; fi"
WatchdogSec = 30s
[Install]
WantedBy = default.target
This configures Maestral as a notify service, i.e., systemd will expect it to send periodic status updates. On your next login, the Maestral daemon will be started automatically. The command given for ExecStopPost will send a notification when Maestral crashes (during startup or later).
To sync a different account, configure it first and use maestral start -f -c CONFIG instead (and rename the service file accordingly).