How to mount Box.com storage via davfs2

A while ago Box.com had a promotion and they were giving out a free 25GB account, so I hurried to get one. If you were like me, or if you just have some storage with them and are looking for a way to mount it in Ubuntu, here's the solution.

We will be mounting your box.com storage with WebDav, so we will need to install a package for that:

$ sudo apt-get install davfs2

After the package is installed we will need to reconfigure it so normal users can mount it. When prompted if unprivileged users can be allowed to mount WebDav resources, say "Yes":

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure davfs2

We also need to give it the proper permission and add your user to the proper group:

$ sudo chmod u+s /sbin/mount.davfs $ sudo addgroup [user] davfs2

Now create a location where you would like to mount your storage. I chose the following:

$ mkdir $HOME/Export/Box

Now we need to create two configuration files for davfs2, one for file locking, and another with your credentials. The files should be in the following format:

$ mkdir $HOME/.davfs2 $ cd .davfs2 $ cat davfs2.conf  use_locks 0 $ cat secrets  https://www.box.com/dav [email] [password] $ chmod 600 secrets

Almost done. We now will add an entry in fstab (sudo vim /etc/fstab) to mount box.com automatically:

# Mounts Box.com https://www.box.com/dav /home/[user]/Export/Box davfs _netdev,rw,user 0 0

And that's it. As long as you have a network connection box.com will be mounted automatically (that's the _netdev option). And if it doesn't, you can run the command below to mount it:

$ mount $HOME/Export/Box