Global Shell Variables for Dropbox Paths

2014-08-31 by Ryan M in Tech

I have multiple computers running Dropbox, all of which have different folder paths to where the Dropbox folder is located. I wanted to have a universal way to find and navigate to the folders regardless of what computer I was on.

In most cases, setting a variable to your Dropbox path is relatively easy. You could set your .bashrc to look something like this

DROPBOX_PERSONAL=$HOME/Dropbox

But this fails in a few situations, all of which apply to me on one or more of my computers

Multiple Dropbox accounts on one computer (Personal and Business accounts)
Dropbox isn't located in my home folder

If you're running Dropbox version 2.8 or higher (you should be anyways), there's a json file that tells you where your Dropbox folders are located. The json looks like this:

{
    "personal": {
        "path": "/Users/username/Dropbox (Personal)",
        "host": 1234
    },
    "business": {
        "path": "/Users/username/Dropbox (Business)", 
        "host": 5678
    }
}

What this means is that you can set global variables using this information in your .bashrc or .bash_profile so that you always know where your Dropbox folder is

DROPBOX_WORK=$(python -c "import json;f=open('$HOME/.dropbox/info.json', 'r').read();data=json.loads(f);print data.get('business', {}).get('path', '')")
DROPBOX_PERSONAL=$(python -c "import json;f=open('$HOME/.dropbox/info.json', 'r').read();data=json.loads(f);print data.get('personal', {}).get('path', '')")

Now all you have to do is reference your Dropbox folders with $DROPBOX_PERSONAL or $DROPBOX_WORK.

ryanmo.co

Global Shell Variables for Dropbox Paths