Since the Dropbox client software installed on my computer never seems to automatically update, I wrote a Python script to do it for me. It was developed and tested under Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2.
The script does the following:
- Checks
/Applications/Dropbox.appfor the currently-installed version number. - Checks http://www.dropbox.com/install for the "latest available version" (i.e., whichever version is listed on the Download button, which may or may not be the latest available version).
- If the installed version number is less than the latest available version,
it attempts to download a DMG of the latest version to
~/Downloads. - If a DMG was successfully downloaded, the script then mounts the DMG and runs the installer.
There are several assumptions made in the script. I tried to document them all and use easily-modifiable constants wherever possible. If the script fails, one of the assumptions may no longer be valid.
There are two command-line options (run with --help for details). The
-v/--version option allows you to specify the version to install. This is
useful when installing Forum builds. The -d/--dry-run option performs a
"dry run" which downloads the DMG but does not mount it or run the installer.
The script requires the beautifulsoup4 module. It is used to scrape the
Dropbox download page to determine the version number. It can be installed via
either pip install beautifulsoup4 or easy_install beautifulsoup4.