Programmatically Download Content from Shared Dropbox Folder Links

Question

I'm building an application to automatically trigger a download of a Dropbox file shared with a user (shared file/folder link). This was straight forward to implement for Dropbox links to files, as is outlined here.

Unfortunately this doesn't work for shared folders. Anyone have suggestions on how I could

Download the all of it's contents (maybe get a list of the files links inside it to download?)

or

Download a zip of the folder

Currently I can go to the url and do some screen-scraping to try and get the contents list, but the advantage of the solution described in the linked Dropbox blog entry for files is that no scraping is needed, so it's much more reliable and efficient.

Standard FTP libraries don't work in this situation, something like paramiko? — Chris Hawkes, Nov 26 '13 at 20:34
This is for Dropbox shared links only. Updated the first line to make that clearer. — Cian, Nov 26 '13 at 20:46

score 29 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 27 '13 at 12:53

29

Dropbox's support team just filled me in on the best way to do this:

Just add ?dl=1 to the end of the shared link. That'll give you a zipped version of the shared folder.

So if the link shared with a user is https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xyz/xyz-YZ (or similar, which links to a shared folder), to download a zipped version of that folder just access https://www.dropbox.com/sh/xyz/xyz-YZ?dl=1

Hope this helps someone else also.

answered Nov 27 '13 at 12:53

Cian

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Doesn't seem to work with folders larger than 2 Gb though - the resulting file is corrupt. – DenNukem Jul 28 '14 at 05:06
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actually, as of now you'll get a 500 error if the resulting size is over 1GB – xaphod Sep 15 '15 at 18:13
How to know the share url if change the folder name? Maybe can encrypt it somehow using the `access_token`? @Cian – Mr. Blond Oct 25 '15 at 16:13
@EdgarsŠturms I'm not sure - I think you'd need to request the share URL again. This way of downloading assumes you have the correct share URL. – Cian Nov 20 '15 at 11:04
@Cian Found the answer to my question [stackoverflow.com](http://stackoverflow.com/q/33332241/2259618) – Mr. Blond Nov 21 '15 at 20:31
@EdgarsŠturms nice one – Cian Nov 23 '15 at 11:14
@Cian, can you share the code to download Dropbox file with ?dl=1 in Ruby? – Remy Wang Jun 02 '20 at 14:55

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 01 '17 at 17:42

When downloading direct shared links to files through python I was getting html pages instead of actual file content. Changing ?dl=1 wasn't helping. I then noticed that wget was downloading the actual file, even when ?dl=0. Seems like dropbox detects wget user agent and responds with the file, so setting the user agent header to Wget/1.16 (linux-gnu) in python solved the issue, now any dropbox shared link is being downloaded properly:

headers = {'user-agent': 'Wget/1.16 (linux-gnu)'}
r = requests.get(url, stream=True, headers=headers)
with open(filepath, 'wb') as f:
    for chunk in r.iter_content(chunk_size=1024): 
        if chunk:
            f.write(chunk)

score -4 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 26 '13 at 23:48

-4

This should really be done by using the awesome Dropbox Core API, which allows you to upload or download files, see information on file deltas and information on shared folders/files.

The API is rather simple, as it returns a common URL to download any item from Dropbox accounts with.

answered Nov 26 '13 at 23:48

VooDooNOFX

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How could this be done through the Core API? The issue is downloading folders from a link sent to a user. Doing this through the Dropbox Core API would require Oauth access to the account of every person who sent files to the user? – Cian Nov 27 '13 at 09:23
1

Yes, it would require each user to allow your application to login on their behalf, however, your application would have access to everything more directly. Otherwise, you haven't explained your problem well enough to get a different answer. – VooDooNOFX Nov 27 '13 at 10:19
1

The link to the Dropbox blog regarding downloading files from links illustrates the situation exactly in Dropbox's words - but the problem is providing the same functionality for folders, as desciribed in the question. – Cian Nov 27 '13 at 12:43

Programmatically Download Content from Shared Dropbox Folder Links

3 Answers3

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