About

dropbox-dl is a small command-line program written in PHP to recursively download the contents of a public Dropbox folder (no credentials or API key/secret required). This is a bit of a hack / workaround for Dropbox not allowing you to directly download a folder that is over 1 GB in size. See the unfortunate scenario below.

Installation

• Requires PHP 5.3.2 or higher.

Mac OS X users with Homebrew:

brew tap jbmcg/tap
brew install dropbox-dl

Other UNIX distros / manual installation:

curl -L https://github.com/jbmcg/dropbox-dl/raw/master/bin/dropbox-dl -o dropbox-dl
chmod a+rx dropbox-dl
mv dropbox-dl /usr/local/bin/dropbox-dl

The dropbox-dl executable is just a compiled .phar file so if you'd rather not install it globally, you can also just download and run it using:

php /path/to/dropbox-dl [OPTIONS]

Usage

dropbox-dl [url] [path] [recursive] [ext1] [ext2] ...

parameter	description
url	A public Dropbox URL.
path	Local path to save files to. Defaults to current working directory.
recursive	Whether to download all files recursively (specify 1 or 0). Defaults to 1.
ext(s)	Specify one or more file extensions to filter by. Add multiple parameters to accept multiple extensions.

Examples

Download all files (including subfolders) to your current working directory:

dropbox-dl https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9d3gqhtqw0kf9d7/AAC09AQRODS_F7EVYXt5mgcMa

Download files on root of URL (no subfolders) to an existing folder on your desktop called "stuff":

dropbox-dl https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9d3gqhtqw0kf9d7/AAC09AQRODS_F7EVYXt5mgcMa ~/Desktop/stuff 0

Download only JPG, PNG, and GIF images (including those found in subfolders) to your current working directory:

dropbox-dl https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9d3gqhtqw0kf9d7/AAC09AQRODS_F7EVYXt5mgcMa . 1 jpg png gif