Dropbox Public Folder Emulator

Dropbox Public Folder Emulator is an emulator that mimics the old "Public" folder that was retired by Dropbox.

Dropbox Public Folder

A bit of history

In previous times every account had a folder named "Public". All the content in this folder was automatically shared to everybody on the Internet if you knew the URL.

For accounts created after October 2012 this feature was not available anymore and in March 2017 it was completely removed from Dropbox.

How I used the public folder

I used this feature to host my downloads. It was a simple redirect in my nginx configuration files. I manually created the download links that I put on my website and give to people (via email). Now that the feature is gone, I needed a replacement.

Inspired by https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader I created this Python project (from scratch) that I run on my site to emulate the public folder by querying the Dropbox-API.

Overview

This script has to run on your own webserver, in my case behind nginx. It can probably run on any webserver or cloud service, but I haven't tested that at all.

Setup the OAuth authentication and select a directory where all the downloadable files live, defaults to /Apps/PublicFolderEmulator.

You manually create a URL for the file to download, like: http://downloads.example.com/dir/file.ext

This URL/request is parsed by the Python script and the full filename is given to the Dropbox-API. The API returns the URL of the downloadable file.

/Apps/PublicFolderEmulator/dir/file.ext will be translated to https://www.dropbox.com/s/Som3R4ndomH4sh/file.ext?dl=1

This is new URL given to nginx that return a HTTP status 302 with this new URL.

Installation

Webserver

Make sure Python 3 is installed.

sudo apt install python3

In /opt clone the git repository.

git clone https://github.com/ffes/dropbox-public-folder-emulator.git

In /etc/nginx/XXX.conf add the following lines:

Authenticate on Dropbox.com

To setup OAuth you need to do the next steps:

• Copy conf_sample.py to conf.py. You will need to store the OAuth token in that file.
• Go to https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps and log in with your account.
• Click on the Create App button and then select Dropbox API app.
• Now go on with the configuration and choose App folder.
• Enter the App Name that you prefer (e.g. PublicFolderEmulator).
• Accept the terms and click on the Create App button.
• When your new App is successfully created, please click on the Generate button under the Generated access token section, then copy and paste the new access token in conf.py.
• There is no need to change the App status from Development to Production because you (aka your webserver) will the only user.