dropfromshell

A script, written in Swift, to up- and download files from Dropbox.

Purpose

The code is meant for those interactions with Dropbox, you'd normally do with a shell script. It's not meant for usage in a full-fledged macOS or iOS app. There are probably better solutions for that. This code is explicitly structured to be super-simple, and very easy to understand and hack yourself.

Current capabilities

The code supports:

• Listing files and directories
• Creating directories
• Getting information on a single file or directory
• Uploading a file
• Downloading a file

Note that the Dropbox API supports uploading and downloading bigger files, in chunks. This code doesn't support that.

Install

It's just the basis for a script. You don't install it centrally. You just fork this repo, clone it somewhere convenient, hack at your leisure in Xcode or vim, then run it from the commandline when you're finished.

Usage

To use it, first create an OAuth token on the Dropbox site, see here: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/oauth-guide

To use this token, there are two options:

• At the top of the dropfromshell.swift file, put it in var oauthAccessToken
• Or create a JSON file in ~/.config/dropfromshell/dropfromshell.json with the following content, then add the line oauthAccessToken = readOauthAccessToken() at the bottom of the dropfromshell.swift file.

{
    "oauthAccessToken" : "your_token_here_ABCDEFG34567890POIUf"
}

Then, copy the dropfromshell.swift file anywhere you want to start scripting, make it executable (i.e. chmod 755 dropfromshell.swift) and start coding at the bottom of the file.

Note, it would be much cleaner if you could start an empty file, and just include dropfromshell.swift but that's not a feature that Swift supports right now.

Shortcomings

If you wish to upload larger files, or download big directories, the Dropbox API provides capabilities for this (cursors). This is not implemented right now.

Inspiration

My inspiration was the great Dropbox Uploader script. Arguably, it might be a better solution if you're fluent in Bash. https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader