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!