Use Python to get more from Dropbox

This month’s tutorial will look at the Dropbox Public REST API. The programming language of choice for this tutorial is Python, but we’re also going to use curl to interact with the Dropbox API. To be able to run the Python code and the curl commands on your own, you’ll need to have a Dropbox account. So, without further ado, lets get started!

Dropbox everything!

Before coding we need an introduction to Dropbox for Developers. Your journey for developing applications that use Dropbox begins at https://developers.dropbox.com. From there, press the Documentation link at the top of the page. The screenshot (right) shows part of the main documentation page of the Dropbox REST API – feel free to browse the documentation to learn more details about it.

Among other things, in this screenshot we can see the officially supported programming languages, which at the time of writing are Swift, Objective-C, Python, .NET, Java, JavaScript and HTTP. The last one means that Dropbox offers a REST API that you can use from any programming language, provided that you’ve read about the supported endpoints () and the information that you should send and expect to receive from them. However, because it’s much more difficult to work with HTTP endpoints, this tutorial Python package. Using a package obscures most of the complexity and makes the development faster and error free.