Access and file upload using command line (RAW socket)

Cool! I understand that I need to use OAuth2, correct?
I looked at this link that you sent me, but I did not understand how I send the authorization command, I did not find an example.

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#authorization

can you help me?

hello lucasromeiro,

As mentioned in the link you referenced, to begin the OAuth 2 flow you would just make a simple GET request, that should be made via the system browser, to:

https://www.dropbox.com/oauth2/authorize

And supply the parameters as listed, at a bare minimum your request URL would look like:

https://www.dropbox.com/oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=abcdefg123

response_type can either be 'code' or 'token' and client_id is your app key from the developer console (as listed in the description of the /oauth2/authorize documentation).

In this case, if you use the code flow, the user will be presented with a page asking them to login, if they are not already, and then to authorize your application. If they allow it they will be presented a code they can enter back into your app.

Your app can then use:

https://api.dropboxapi.com/oauth2/token

to convert that code into an actual API token you can use to make calls against the Dropbox API. Pay attention to the authorization requirements of this endpoint (again documentation is covered in the link you referenced). This is a POST request vs. a GET for the previous step so adjust and encode parameters accordingly.

Hope that helps get you past this,

-Chuck

Hello chirstius

Thanks for helping me!
I think you understood what I need.
I'm still saying.
I'm going through parts ...

First I tried to make the GET using the pattern I passed above.
But it still does not work ...

When I use the terminal / command line to send the GET, I have no response ...

Look below the commands I sent:

Server: www.dropbox.com
Door: 443 or 80

1:

GET /oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=g0xkpmfu025XXXX/ HTTP/1.1
Host: dropbox.com

2:

GET /oauth2/authorize?response_type=code&client_id=g0xkpmfu025XXXX/ HTTP/1.1
Host: dropbox.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: application/octet-stream
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

Test these 2 formats, in both I got no other server response, neither error, nor success ...

What could it be?

I did not succeed in anything, because I could not do it ...

Thank you very much for your help !!

lucasromeiro,

That GET request needs to be made from a browser. You can script launching the system browser on your device and pointing it to the generated URL which will make a simple GET request by default. I should have been more clear on that in my previous response.

Have you tried just pasting your URL into a browser to see if it's working at all? I'd start there to make sure it's well-formed and that Dropbox responds with a proper authentication window. Then you can look at how to script launching the browser to open that URL.

-Chuck

chirstius

Hello! It worked!

I pasted the URL into the browser and it returned an authentication window!

Thank you for explaining better.

But in my case, I need to do everything by terminal / command line.

Because my solution will be all in command line (raw socket). how can I do this command line authentication?

it's possible?

Every time I use the system, will I need to do this or is it only once?

Thanks a lot for the help!

lucasromeiro,

Once you have the token it's good until it is revoked. If you are only planning on doing this for a single user/account (you) you can probably use a generated token from your developer console (which is just a shortcut to link the app to your Dropbox directly) and avoid the OAuth 2 flow entirely. If you need this to run against multiple accounts you'll want to find a workable solution for the OAuth 2 flow and make sure you have a secure mechanism in place for storing API tokens.

-Chuck

chirstius

Nice, i got it.
So I have 2 options:
- Use Token from my developer account
- Use OAuth2 and store Tokens on my device.

I want to learn how to do both ways.
Because I'll need the 2.

I have a secure location to store the tokens to use OAuth 2.
But I do not know how to authenticate the uduário through OAuth 2 through raw socket.

I need to know what to send to authenticate the user using the 2 options (Token and OAuth 2)

Can you help me? I do not know what commands I have to send for this, I believe a GET or POST. But I do not know the structure.

I need help.

lucasromeiro,

I'm not sure there's an easy way around authenticating through the browser, that's really how the OAuth2 workflow needs to run for us. What you might be able to do is generate the authorization link, write it to the console/terminal and ask your user to copy it into a browser on another device. Then prompt for the code that comes back. They can enter the code into the terminal, and you can complete authorization from there and store their token. Since this is a one-time action it might be an acceptable workaround.

As to your other question(s) around uploading, there is the singular /upload endpoint for files of 150MB or smaller:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-upload

And there are chunked session endpoints for files larger than 150MB:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-upload_session-start

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-upload_session-append_v2

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-upload_session-finish

and also:
https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-upload_session-finish_batch

https://www.dropbox.com/developers/documentation/http/documentation#files-upload_session-finish_batch-check

If you are committing a large number of concurrent uploads.

The singular upload endpoint example in the documentation is self-contained. If you are using curl it should work as-is to upload smaller files.

For chunked uploads, you would need to determine what mechanism is available to you to chunk the files and provide that data to the endpoints (/start and /append_v2). That mechanism is a bit outside the scope of Dropbox API support though and is highly dependant on the platform and libraries available to you which I can't help with.

I do hope this gets you a bit closer to a solution,

-Chuck