I have previously hacked around some on my own open source Dropbox clone, but I haven’t had the time lately. I came across a project called Seafile, which looks promising as an open-source Dropbox alternative. Unfortunately, they don’t package their installation for Arch Linux, so I had to get my hands a little dirty to try it out. I created four AUR packages for seafile and its dependencies:
For the curious, my installation instructions and packages are based on the directions at https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/wiki/Build-and-deploy-seafile-server-from-source and https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/wiki/Build-and-use-seafile-client-from-source. In these instructions, I assume you are using Arch Linux, and that you are familiar with how to use makepkg, pacman & friends to build and install packages from the AUR.
Build/install the Seafile package
You must install the seafile package above, along with all its dependencies. The easiest way to do this is using the AUR helper of your choice, but you can also do this manually if you wish. For most of the AUR helpers, this will look something like
pacaur -S seafile
or
yaourt -S seafile
Install the Seafile server
If you simply want to use the seafile client with seafile.com and are not interested in hosting your own server, skip to the next section. Otherwise, read on to install the seafile server on your machine.
Now that the seafile package and all its dependencies are installed, create a directory where you wish to serve the seafile files out of. This should be somewhere with plenty of space, as all the files served by your seafile installation will ultimately live here. This directory should be owned by the user you want your seafile server to run as. In fact, you should su into that user and run the rest of these commands from there. I’ll refer to the directory you just created as $SEABASE from here on out.
Download seahub, the web server portion of the seafile server.
mkdir -p $SEABASE/seafile-server
cd $SEABASE/seafile-server
wget http://seafile.googlecode.com/files/seahub-latest.tar.gz
tar xf seahub-latest.tar.gz
mv seahub-${version} seahub
cd ..
Run the setup script to generate all the configuration files:
seafile-admin setup
Fill out the requested fields following the provided directions. You may now start/stop the seafile server using the following commands:
seafile-admin start
seafile-admin stop
Note that the seafile-admin commands must be run from the $SEABASE directory.
For more information, consult the Seafile wiki page for installing from source (but remember that the top part of the page won’t apply to you since your AUR helper has downloaded, built, and installed all necessary packages for you).
Using the Seafile client
At this point, the Seafile client shouldn’t need further installation. Running
seafile-applet
should start the client, presenting a configuration screen on the first time it is run.
Enjoy! And, of course, let me know if you encounter any problems.
Update (2013.03.08): Updated seahub-latest.tar.gz download URL.