I'm struggleing to download a single file from the API

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novaut wrote:

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I'm following the App Authentication example from https://www.dropbox.com/developers/reference/auth-types#app

 

Why it doesn't work? I just want to use the API in a simple way.

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Hi novaut,

Wow, wow, wow... 😁 I haven't seen this big fault of Dropbox documentation. You can call some API endpoints with application authorization only when public data are handled (i.e. data for links etc). The examples shown there are completely wrong! Application authorization is designated for application confirmation (no some user authentication), that's why you can NOT access any user data in such a way. As noted in your error message for such thing bearer access token is needed (something showing that the particular user grant access to its data) - something you miss. That's why it doesn't work.

🙂 Another stupid thing is statement:

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... This can be done either as separate strings, as shown in the first two examples below, or as an base64-encoded Basic authorization string in the Authorization header ...

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The Basic authentication is ALWAYS performed with base64 encoding!!! You can do it explicitly or let curl does it internally. The person typing this documentation needs some tutorials...

Anyway... since you need user access, you need user authentication too. 😉 You need least access token (as noted there). Keep in mind that such a token is short lived. It's enough for single time use or use in relatively short period of time. If you need to gain access for longer period (without automatic expiration), than refresh token is needed too. You can take a look here how you can manage this.

Hope this helps.

novaut To download a file, it is correct to use the /2/files/download endpoint. You can find the information for using that endpoint in the documentation for /2/files/download here. As shown there, that endpoint supports "User Authentication", but not "App Authentication". There's also an curl example for that endpoint in endpoint documentation.

For reference, the "Authentication types" page lists different types that are used by different endpoints of the Dropbox API, but not every endpoint supports every type. The examples under each type show some example(s) of an endpoint which do support that type. For instance, the examples under "App Authentication" show the use of /2/files/get_thumbnail_v2, which does support App Authentication, but not /2/files/download.

So, to call /2/files/download, you need to use "User Authentication", which requires the an OAuth 2 access token as a "Bearer" token. It's not possible to successfully call /2/files/download using an app key/secret as "Basic" authorization.

And as Здравко noted, you need to authorize the app manually once, after which you can use the (short-lived) access token and refresh token. The "authorization code" can only be used once, in the process of retrieving the access token and refresh token. The refresh token doesn't expire automatically though, and can be re-used repeatedly without manual intervention to retrieve new short-lived access tokens whenever needed. You can find more information in the OAuth Guide and authorization documentation. There's a basic outline of processing this flow in this blog post which may serve as a useful example.