Share folders and subfolders with Dropbox in Linux

By | October 1, 2010

Dropbox is a nifty little application that lets you sync and share files on the Internet and between several computers. Want to send a movie to a friend? Use Dropbox. Want to have a common folder for pictures that you and your girlfriend can update on different computers? Use Dropbox.
The problem with Dropbox is that you can’t share entire folders. Only individual links. That’s where dropbox-index comes in. Download the Python script and use it like this to share an entire folder of files:

./dropbox-index.py /path/to/Dropbox/Public/folder

Use -R if you have subdirectories in that folder that you’d like to share:

./dropbox-index.py -R /path/to/Dropbox/Public/folder

After you’ve done this, right-click on the index.html file that was created in the shared folder and choose Copy Dropbox public link. Share that link and the recipient will see a webpage allowing downloads for the shared files.

4 thoughts on “Share folders and subfolders with Dropbox in Linux

  1. T4L Post author

    @Dusten B: I didn’t notice that the newest version lets you also share folders. However, I see you can only display 10 items at once. When you have folders with hundreds of files in them, the method above seems better to me because it displays them all in the same page.

    Reply
  2. Dusten B.

    @T4L I never knew that the default view for the shared public link thing only displayed 10 items per page. (I don’t use that feature, only knew of its existence) Though I did discover that by clicking on the “list view” option in the upper right of the shared public link it will lump them on one page.

    Alternatively, there is also a project that’s been around for a while called “pyindexer” that builds a html index file similarly to that dropbox-index script. It is buried in the forums somewhere, there may be a link to it in the Dropbox Wiki.

    Reply
  3. Neil

    A question – will this work in Windows too?

    And if so, can anyone tell me what to do to run it? I want the function of this script, but really haven’t a clue about Python…

    Reply

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