Got good(ish) PHP/Web developing skills? *nix is your breakfast? Get over here!!!

[spoon_]

What I'm trying to do seems very simple but I DON'T have any skills whatsoever to do this... I'm willing to learn though.

Basically I have installed Dropbox app on my server running cut down version of Ubuntu. No GUI is available.

If you're not familiar with Dropbox head over to their website at http://www.dropbox.com

Its basically file syncing app, you drop files into your Dropbox folder(s) and they get synced up to the cloud and other devices that are linked to your account. iPhones, Mac/Linux/Windows clients. Pretty awesome stuff.

Daemon of Dropbox is running and to get any sort of output/status from it you need to mess about with the command line via SSH.

Not very user friendly if you ask me.

Server is running web-server [Apache ], got PHP installed [5.2.11], MySQL & Python 2.7 if needed.

Now you probably know where I'm going with this...

I'd like to build nice looking front end to be able to perform very basic (for now) functionality on Dropbox. Example, to check if all my folders are synced up I need to issue this command:

/share/MD0_DATA/.qpkg/Dropbox/tools/dropbox.py filestatus /share/Dropbox/*

Output:

/share/Dropbox/!!!: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Backups: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Certs: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Docs: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Drivers Win7 x64: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Drivers WinXP x86: up to date
/share/Dropbox/ImageX: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Installs Win7 x64: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Links: up to date
/share/Dropbox/My Docs: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Photos: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Projects: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Public: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Scripts: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Shared_Folders: up to date
/share/Dropbox/Software: up to date

More commands are available:

[~] # /share/MD0_DATA/.qpkg/Dropbox/tools/dropbox.py help
Dropbox command-line interface

commands:

status get current status of the dropboxd
help provide help
puburl get public url of a file in your dropbox
stop stop dropboxd
start start dropboxd
filestatus get current sync status of one or more files
ls list directory contents with current sync status


Now what I know about PHP is that's server side so should be able to output what I need & nicely formatted if I press a button on the page. I'd probably like to have a button for each function above i.e. status, help, puburl etc

Question - where do I even start?


Adrian

[scaryjim]

Where do you start? By reading up on security concerns! You can run shell commands from PHP, but you're risking all sorts of security holes writing a web application to do it, so be *very* careful.

Although I don't know anything about it myself, I'd be inclined to suggest that it may be safer / easier to learn Python and use that - you should be able to import the Dropbox python scripts and run them directly which *should* present less security problems then trying to run shell / system commands directly from PHP. Although as I said, I don't know python, so I might be mistaken on that...

[spoon_]

Yeah that's right, you can imagine someone fairly easily executing rm -rf * lol

[streetster]

I was going to recommend having a read about 'exec' but it could be a dangerous route... so instead i'll point you to the dropboxAddons wiki page for you to have a look if someone has already done something similar

[spoon_]

I have checked Wiki pages for Dropbox already, nothing there that might help me. Also I'd mixed results with exec command wrapped around some rather experimental php code.

Oh well.

How you do these things in rather secure manner? I mean how can you execute commands from the web server without compromising the server itself?

[Flash477]

It wouldn't be real time, but you could have the status written to a text file through cron, and then have PHP query the contents of the file.

[TheAnimus]

I don't know much about dropbox, but surely you can query that info without been root?

I would have hoped they have httpd running as a very hevily restricted user, it might just be a case of granting it execute on some scripts?