Summary

A GAE proxy to your Dropbox account.

Description

The DropbProx aims to allow you to use your own domain to get files published in your Dropbox. So, after setting up your Dropbox account number at the application and publish it on Google App Engine (GAE), you will access your files in the Dropbox linking them to a more significant domain than that presented by URL http://dl.dropbox.com/u/YOURDROPBOXNUMBER.

This code is a very simple reduction/adaptation of mirrorrr project (by Brett Slatkin) held specifically to achieve the goals to build a proxy for public files from a user account in the Dropbox. If you want a full (and FREE) proxy to run on GAE, use the mirrorrr!

Motivation

I was looking for a FREE alternative to the problem described above. That's because I canceled my account on a virtual private server (VPS), which kept my domains. So, I could not use Apache 2 as reverse proxy or his mod_rewrite as a solution to this problem. With just a few searches on Google, I found a proxy written in Python (and able to run on GAE). Thus, I adapted his code to suit my needs.

Installation

Create a new project on GAE.

For example, I created a project named pj74arqs. A good tutorial about how to do this (for windows users) is the post "Setup your own Proxy Server in 5 Minutes for Free"

Change application variable at file app.yaml to the name of your created project on GAE;
Change DROPBOX_NUMBER variable at file mirror.py to your own Dropbox number;
Publish the application on GAE;

Windows users: see this post;

Optional: Change the domain of the published application.

In my case, after publish the application, the domain was pj74arqs.appspot.com. But, this wasn't good for me yet. So, I changed the URL for that application to my subdomain: a.paulojeronimo.com. That was much better!

Use

Instead of access your files using the Dropbox URL (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/YOURDROPBOXNUMBER) you can now use the GAE application URL.

In my case, instead of access files at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/345266, I can now do that using http://a.paulojeronimo.com. For example, the files http://dl.dropbox.com/u/345266/curriculo/curriculo-pj.html and http://a.paulojeronimo.com/curriculo/curriculo-pj.html (my portuguese resume ;-) are the same, but the second is much more expressive, isn't it?

Update a file in your Dropbox account and refresh your URL. You will see that was updated in your proxy too!