This script makes it easier to share screenshots and files via Dropbox on OS X. If you hate the public landing page you get with these Dropbox features, read on.

Dropbox already has that!

Dropbox already provides Shared Links and Shared Screenshots. They point to an HTML landing page that allows the user to download or browse files (or bugs them to sign up for Dropbox). For some use cases this is fine, but most of the time I’d rather have a direct link to paste into Slack or GitHub Issues.

Shared Links can be edited manually to point directly to a file. But I hate doing things manually so I wrote a thing to save me seconds a week.

Gimme

shotty is written in Ruby. If you are a Rubyist, you may care to know the script uses OS X’s system Ruby with standard library dependencies only. If you’re not a Rubyist, that jargon means you don’t need to install anything special to run shotty.

The script can be downloaded directly from GitHub. Run the following commands in Terminal.app.

Download the script:

curl -L https://github.com/itspriddle/shotty/raw/master/bin/shotty > /usr/local/bin/shotty

Make it executable:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/shotty

Check that it works:

shotty -v

You should see output like “Shotty v0.1.0”

Authorization

To use shotty, you need a Dropbox OAuth2 key. To generate one, run shotty authorize and follow the instructions in your browser.

Note that shotty uses full Dropbox access so it can access all of your files. The shotty-server handles the OAuth flow.

Usage

You can now use shotty to work with your Dropbox account. If you only care about automatically copying Dropbox URLs when you take a screenshot, skip the next section.

The shotty script

The shotty script contains several subcommands for working with shared links. See shotty --help for a full overview. The most useful are:

  • shotty create-url <file>: Creates a Dropbox URL for the specifed file. This should be used with files that have never had a shared link generated. Otherwise it will fail.
  • shotty get-url <file>: Gets an existing Dropbox shared link for the specified file.
  • shotty url <file>: Gets or creates a Dropbox shared link for the given file. This is useful when it is not known ahead of time whether a file already has a shared link.

Automatically copy direct Dropbox URLs for screenshots

Do you want a direct Dropbox URL copied to your clipboard when you create a screenshot? Me too, here’s how.

Since the screenshot sharing feature built into Dropbox doesn’t support a direct link, turn it off. Option+Click on the Dropbox icon in the OS X menubar and click Preferences. Click the Import tab, then uncheck “Share screenshots using Dropbox”.

A launchd.plist will be used to copy screenshots from ~/Desktop to ~/Dropbox/Shotty and copy a direct shared link to the clipboard.

To enable this behavior:

shotty plist > $(shotty plist-file)
launchctl load $(shotty plist-file)

To disable:

launchctl unload $(shotty plist-file)
rm $(shotty plist-file)

See the screenshot_directory configuration option below to customize the directory screenshots are copied to.

NOTE: If you used dropbox-screenshots-plist, make sure to disable that first:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/net.nevercraft.dropbox-screenshots.plist
rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/net.nevercraft.dropbox-screenshots.plist

Configuration

shotty configuration is stored in a JSON file at ~/.config/shotty.json. The following options are available:

  • token REQUIRED: Dropbox API OAuth2 access token.
  • dropbox_root OPTIONAL: Root Dropbox directory, by default ~/Dropbox. Useful if you have personal and business Dropbox folders on the same machine.
  • screenshot_directory OPTIONAL: Directory to store screenshots in, by default ~/Dropbox/Shotty. This must be a subdirectory of dropbox_root.

Full example configuration file:

{
  "token":                "MY-REDACTED-TOKEN",
  "dropbox_root":         "/Users/priddle/Dropbox (Personal)",
  "screenshot_directory": "/Users/priddle/Dropbox/Shotty"
}

Ugh, I hate you, make this all go away.

Visit Dropbox Account Security, and remove “shotty-cli” at the bottom of the page.

To remove shotty from your system:

launchctl unload $(shotty plist-file)
rm $(shotty plist-file)
rm $(shotty config-file)
rm /usr/local/bin/shotty

Development

  1. Fork it (https://github.com/itspriddle/shotty/fork)
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create a new Pull Request

License

MIT License - see LICENSE in this repo.

Tags: API, Dropbox, Git, Heroku, Oauth, Ruby, Sinatra, launchd, macOS