Over on Github I've published a Docker-based system for syncing a Dropbox folder with a S3 bucket. Drop a file in a designated Dropbox subdirectory, and it is automatically uploaded to S3. |
This is useful when you have a group of non-technical people who want to publish content to the web. For instance, a church might regularly generate podcasts (interesting fact: churches are prolific podcasters), and the weekly podcast need to be uploaded easily by a volunteer. With a dropbox-to-S3-syncer set up, the process is easy:- Get each volunteer to install Dropbox
- Designate a folder to be the "public website" folder, and share this
- Anything placed in the designated folder automatically gets synced to S3
Large files may take a while to upload to S3. When largefile.mp3 is added, a temporary marker file, largefile.mp3.uploading.txt appears, giving the uploader feedback that something is happening. When uploading.txt disappears (or is replaced with uploadfailures.txt in case of errors), the file is uploaded.
This Dropbox-to-S3 system seems to work pretty well when everyone already has Dropbox installed. A few caveats apply:
- The upload script is write-only, to avoid the risk of Dropbox shenanigans trashing public content. This means that removing accidentally added content still requires an S3 browser. In future I might implement a hack whereby the presence of a
filename.delete file results in filename (and filename.delete) being deleted. - The Dropbox folder must be cleaned out manually occasionally, to avoid eating up everyone's Dropbox quotas. This doesn't affect S3-published content, as deletes aren't propagated to S3.
- Of course, this requires a server to host the Dropbox-to-S3 Docker images, and all the sysadmin overhead that implies. The Dropbox-hosting Docker container takes about 318Mb of memory on my Linux host.
Patches welcome, and thanks to Jan B for the docker-dropbox image this is built on.