When I migrated our build to Cake (C# Make) we had one requirement which was to upload some of the build output’s artifacts to DropBox at the end of the build.

I searched for that kind of capabilities in Cake reference documentation but couldn’t find anything out of the box.

I could have gone to write my own add-in but I found the PowerShell one, great! So I decided that I could write a little PowerShell script to achieve that upload to DropBox.

Here it is

<#

.SYNOPSIS
This is a Powershell script to upload a file to DropBox using their REST API.

.DESCRIPTION
This Powershell script will upload file to DropBox using their REST API with the parameters you provide.

.PARAMETER SourceFilePath
The path of the file to upload.
.PARAMETER TargetFilePath
The path of the file on DropBox.

.ENV PARAMETER DropBoxAccessToken
The DropBox access token.
#>

Param(
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
    [string]$SourceFilePath,
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
    [string]$TargetFilePath
)

$arg = '{ "path": "' + $TargetFilePath + '", "mode": "add", "autorename": true, "mute": false }'
$authorization = "Bearer " + (get-item env:DropBoxAccessToken).Value

$headers = New-Object "System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary[[String],[String]]"
$headers.Add("Authorization", $authorization)
$headers.Add("Dropbox-API-Arg", $arg)
$headers.Add("Content-Type", 'application/octet-stream')
 
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri https://content.dropboxapi.com/2/files/upload -Method Post -InFile $SourceFilePath -Headers $headers

The script is getting one environment variable DropBoxAccessToken, which represents the DropBox access token because I don’t want to see the access token logged into our TeamCity logs.

One gotcha from DropBox REST API upload documentation which hit me was how to upload to a business account? In fact, it is really easy, you just need to create an application for your business account with permission full!

Warning, I do not consider myself as a PowerShell expert, I am more of a kind of PowerShell hacker, so take this script with all precautions.