Re: help: long-live tokens for dropbox app

dpellic996

Hello everyone,

I know that there are other issues related to this but I did not find anything that really helped me.
I'm trying to upload images (.png) from my PC to dropbox via an application that I already created.
I'm doing this using a python script I wrote. The part that concerns the dropbox upload is the following:

def upload_to_dropbox(file_path, dropbox_token, dropbox_folder):

dbx = dropbox.Dropbox(dropbox_token)

with open(file_path, 'rb') as f:

filename = os.path.basename(file_path)
dropbox_path = dropbox_folder+filename

dbx.files_upload(f.read(), dropbox_path)

shared_link_metadata = dbx.sharing_create_shared_link(dropbox_path)
return shared_link_metadata.url

In doing this I'm using an access token that I generate in the Console App. This token begins with "sl" and I know that expires in few hours.
Could you please provide me support on how to get a long-live token, or how to refresh automatically the token I'm using?

Thank you in advance 🙂

D.

Greg-DB

Dropbox is no longer offering the option for creating new long-lived access tokens. Dropbox is now issuing short-lived access tokens (and optional refresh tokens) instead of long-lived access tokens. You can find more information on this migration here.

Apps can still get long-term access by requesting "offline" access though, in which case the app receives a "refresh token" that can be used to retrieve new short-lived access tokens as needed, without further manual user intervention. 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.

The official Dropbox SDKs can handle this automatically for you. For the official Dropbox Python SDK, you can find examples of this flow at the following links:

dpellic996

Thank you but I have still a doubt on this..

I don't know any REDIRECT URI.. how can I get one? What's the criterion I could use to choose one? Actually is the only thing I still don't have.

Greg-DB

The redirect URI is the location where the user should be sent after they authorize the app to access their account. It should be a URI controlled by your app and defined by you as the developer of the app. That being the case, I can't tell you exactly what yours should be, but for example, if you're building a web app and your redirect URI for your development environment looks like http://localhost/auth, then it would typically look like https://example.com/auth in the deployed environment. For reference, it is optional; you can opt to not use a redirect URI, in which case you would omit that parameter and the user would need to manually copy/paste the authorization code. For instance, the Python SDK samples I linked to don't use a redirect URI.

dpellic996

So, if I got it right, using a redirect URI is the only way for generating a refresh token automatically (i.e. not manually by authorizing by myself)?

sorry for the confusion, i'm not very into these things and I find this very complicated!

D.

Greg-DB

No, a redirect URI is not required to get a refresh token. Whether or not a redirect URI is used though, the manual authorization step does need to be handled by the user manually in order to authorize the app to access their account and receive a refresh token. This only needs to be done once per account though; the refresh token can then be stored and re-used programmatically without the user present.

Здравко

@dpellic996 wrote:
...
sorry for the confusion, i'm not very into these things and I find this very complicated!
...

Hi @dpellic996,

As Greg already noted, you can initiate and perform authorization (granting access to particular account data) either by hand (without redirect URI; copy-past access code by hand) or automated (automatic redirect from Dropbox site back to your application). An example, that uses redirect URL and that you can take a look on, can be seen here. 😉 I believe this will give you idea how the things could go.

Hope this helps.