Dropbox + eXtplorer: A better web interface
Ok, so I found myself online at a workstation without admin access the other day and needed desperately to edit a file on my Dropbox account, it was just a plain text file and the edit was only small, so I set about finding a way of doing it, and came up with this as a temporary solution until Dropbox have a fully functional, released API…
P.S. The error was actually caused by a non-standard character in the filename (+). I’ll be filing a bug with eXtplorer for that 
Documentation (Wiki) can also be found here.
NOTE: Replace [user] with the username under which the Dropbox folder is located.
NOTE: Replace [FQDN] with either your IP address or the hostname (or FQDN) which you’ll be using to access the interface.
NOTE: This HOWTO assumes that you will be running apache as the user ‘apache’ and that you have already set up your Dropbox account syncing to your /home/[user]/Dropbox folder
To get Dropbox running with apache and extplorer you need to get the following packages:
yum install php httpd
Make the VirtualHost director and get permissions / groups correct:
mkdir /var/www/dropbox chown apache:apache /var/www/dropbox usermod -aG [user] apache usermod -aG apache [user]
Now create and populate an apache virtualhost config file:
vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/dropbox.conf
Populate it with the following text:
NameVirtualHost *:80
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot "/var/www/dropbox"
ServerName [FQDN]
<Directory "/var/www/dropbox">
allow from all
Options +Indexes
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Dropbox"
AuthUserFile /var/www/passwd
Require valid-user
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Now add a username / password to access your interface via HTTP auth:
htpasswd -cm /var/www/passwd yourusername chown apache.apache /var/www/passwd
Make sure that apache has full group access to your Dropbox folder.
chmod g+x /home/[user]
chmod g+rw /home/[user]/Dropbox
find /home/[user]/Dropbox -type d -exec chmod g+x {} ;
Download the latest version of eXtplorer from http://extplorer.sourceforge.net/
cd /var/www/dropbox wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/extplorer/eXtplorer_2.0.1.zip unzip eXtplorer*.zip
Check we haven’t made any mistakes and set the services up:
service httpd configtest service httpd restart chkconfig httpd on
You can now log into http://[FQDN] using a browser and the default credentials (admin/admin) and set up your user, pointing the user’s “Home directory:” at /home/[user]Dropbox. Once you have set up your user you have the choice to remove the HTTP authentication which we included in the VirtualHost configuration above. Simply comment out (or delete) the following lines from your /etc/httpd/conf.d/dropbox.conf file:
AuthType Basic AuthName "Dropbox" AuthUserFile /var/www/passwd Require valid-user
That’s it, you’re done!
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