How to determine the Dropbox folder location programmatically?

Question

I have a script that is intended to be run by multiple users on multiple computers, and they don\'t all have their Dropbox folders in their respective home directories. I\'d

Answer 1

Note: requires Dropbox >= 2.8

Dropbox now stores the paths in json format in a file called info.json. It is located in one of the two following locations:

%APPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Dropbox\info.json

I can access the %APPDATA% environment variable in Python by os.environ['APPDATA'], however I check both that and os.environ['LOCALAPPDATA']. Then I convert the JSON into a dictionary and read the 'path' value under the appropriate Dropbox (business or personal).

Calling get_dropbox_location() from the code below will return the filepath of the business Dropbox, while get_dropbox_location('personal') will return the file path of the personal Dropbox.

import os
import json

def get_dropbox_location(account_type='business'):
    """
    Returns a string of the filepath of the Dropbox for this user

    :param account_type: str, 'business' or 'personal'
    """
    info_path = _get_dropbox_info_path()
    info_dict = _get_dictionary_from_path_to_json(info_path)
    return _get_dropbox_path_from_dictionary(info_dict, account_type)

def _get_dropbox_info_path():
    """
    Returns filepath of Dropbox file info.json
    """
    path = _create_dropox_info_path('APPDATA')
    if path:
        return path
    return _create_dropox_info_path('LOCALAPPDATA')

def _create_dropox_info_path(appdata_str):
    r"""
    Looks up the environment variable given by appdata_str and combines with \Dropbox\info.json

    Then checks if the info.json exists at that path, and if so returns the filepath, otherwise
    returns False
    """
    path = os.path.join(os.environ[appdata_str], r'Dropbox\info.json')
    if os.path.exists(path):
        return path
    return False

def _get_dictionary_from_path_to_json(info_path):
    """
    Loads a json file and returns as a dictionary
    """
    with open(info_path, 'r') as f:
        text = f.read()

    return json.loads(text)

def _get_dropbox_path_from_dictionary(info_dict, account_type):
    """
    Returns the 'path' value under the account_type dictionary within the main dictionary
    """
    return info_dict[account_type]['path']

This is a pure Python solution, unlike the other solution using info.json.