Dockbox.io - Host websites in Dropbox using your domain | Hacker News Reader

Dockbox.io - Host websites in Dropbox using your domain

dockbox.io

41 pointskarlcoelho124 comments

I grow more weary of how many clones there are in this space, especially considering how easy (and within character) it would be for drop box to flick the switch themselves on this.

yet I yearn for increased innovation in this space. I'd love to see this turnkey style hosting support php, databases and more...

This doesn't use dropbox to host content, just to share it with the hosting service. Unless Dropbox pulls the plug on "shared folders", which I doubt, I don't see such services going down.

I'd love to see this turnkey style hosting support php, databases and more

What kind of things are you looking for?

still not sure why we want to use dropbox to host a website... sure its a little more convenient than a free host and ftp, but its a real stretch.

It's only useful for prototyping or testing code in my opinion. I would never suggest hosting a live site on a service like this!

i still don't get it... this is what my hard drive is for :P

just seems to me like making a mashup mess for its own sake, with little regard to the spirit of the service provided by dropbox.

I'd like it if there was a Dropbox based Jekyll service. I could edit my file on any platform, and the site gets rebuilt to html using jekyll (or any other static-site-generator). This will make it as much powerful as GitHub pages, but without the additional git overhead (I'm fine with git, but not everyone is).

well it would need some kind of mechanism to know when to rebuild like git commit. otherwise it would break in the middle of editting.

You've got http://scriptogr.am/

Harp.io does this (although with Harp not Jekyll). Using it to build a little web comic site[1]. Makes it easy for the author to upload new pages even though they don't know how HTML/FTP work.

[1] http://houseoforr.com

Harp.io lost me at: "Harp Platform would like access to all files and folders in your Dropbox. This app will be able to read and modify everything."

I don't know much about DropBox API, but is there a way to limit access to resource folders?

Yes, the Dropbox allows you to create apps which only ask for access to Apps/Appname folder in your dropbox.

Disclosure - I work on Harp

In order to build a truly compelling service that solved our problems, along with others was to allow collaboration and sharing. Right now Dropbox has no way to share within sandbox style applications.

We have been talking with Dropbox about ways to improve their API and things are only getting better.

Right now we maintain the NodeJS API[1][2] and have sandboxing build in at that layer, so we don't even see any files from Dropbox outside of the folder we have scoped to.

[1] github.com/sintaxi/node-dbox [2] https://www.dropbox.com/developers/core/sdks/other

Just create a free Dropbox account, use that one to sign up for Harp, and then share the Harp site folder with your main account. It's a nice way to ensure that Harp is sandboxed.

This is a good idea. I probably don't even have to link it to my machine? But wondering what I'd loose out on for ease of updating. Will try this later.

Yeah you don't even have to link it. Just sign up, then link it via the Harp site, then share it using the web interface.

You don't lose out on anything at all, I'm doing this very thing.

http://Calepin.co does pretty much this but using Pelican to create static pages from markdown. You can use your own domain with a cname too.

http://www.brace.io offers this but also has a separate staging environment which is very useful!

Isn't this the same as site44.com ?

Except it's free.

um... brace.io anyone?? They jsut sent me their free invite. Seems oretty cool to me. Anyone know any reasons why this is better?

What about HTTP Headers and cache-control?

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an VPS account, syncing the files using dropbox-cli, and then using nginx on the synced folder.

(inb4 downvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

I was losing my mind as I read that, up until I clicked the link and realized it was a well placed joke.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com