Upload to Dropbox from the command line in Windows

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I've got an instance of TeamCity running on an Azure VM that I use for build and deployment automation, and a few weeks ago I finally got around to setting up the build, tests, and packaging of a Windows desktop application I've been working on for a while. Up to this point I'd been building the installers manually and shipping them to my partners for testing via a shared Dropbox folder. Once I had the project building on check-ins and running all the automated tests, I really wanted to get to the point where I could release a new version with a button push. My partners are already comfortable with receiving installers via Dropbox and I didn't feel like setting up and maintaining an FTP server (in addition to setting them up with FTP clients). So I needed a way to get TeamCity build artifacts into Dropbox easily.

The obvious option is to install the Dropbox client on the build server and simply copy the installer artifact to the shared folder. The problem with that scenario is that the Dropbox user needs to be logged into the machine for the sync to take place. I'm not willing to leave my account logged in all the time, so that's a non-starter. (Plus, what happens when the build server needs to reboot for maintenance/updates?)

Some googling reveals a few articles about installing the Dropbox client to run as a Windows Service, but in addition to being kludgy I'd have to run the service with my credentials. It seemed like there had to be a better way.

After some more googling I found a project for a command-line Dropbox-Uploader project; it's basically a shell script for handling the upload through Dropbox's REST API. Which is a good start, but it would require me to set up a Dropbox API application entry and, since I want this to run on Windows, would also require a Cygwin install. Cygwin is nice and all, but in these days where most of what Cygwin offers is available in Powershell anyway, I hate installing it on a machine just to handle one small requirement like this.

In the end, I decided to write my own dead-simple Windows command-line Dropbox uploader: PneumaticTube. PneumaticTube1 literally does just that one thing - once you've authorized it with your account, you can upload a file to any path in your Dropbox folder. Using it with TeamCity is a snap - just set up a shell command step in your build to call it with the artifact you want to upload.

The only catch is that you have to do the authorization2 as the account your build agent runs under, which means you actually have to run your agent under a user account (as opposed to running the agent under System, for example)3.

If you want to use it, there's a chocolatey package available to make installation easy. Suggestions, bug reports, questions, and pull requests are welcome - just hit up the issues page and let me know. I hope this helps someone else whose deployment pipeline includes Dropbox.

  1. Dropbox app naming guidelines basically make you pick a name that doesn't include "Dropbox", so "Dropbox Uploader For Windows" was out. The first thing that came to mind when I thought about "put something in and it goes to a destination" were those tube systems at the banks. I love those things. ↩

  2. It uses the standard pattern of popping open a browser window so you can enter your Dropbox credentials and authorize the app. ↩

  3. I'll probably fix this in future versions by allowing you to specify the user secret and user token on the command line (instead of getting them from the user's settings), allowing you to store the secret and token in the build settings. Or maybe someone else will take care of it (pull requests are always welcome). ↩