dropbrowse

Read-only access to a Dropbox account for AI clients: browse folders, find files by name, search inside files for text, read file content, and inspect file metadata. dropbrowse never writes to Dropbox.

Authentication is a Dropbox access token in the DROPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable. Create one in the Dropbox App Console: create an app with "Scoped access" and "Full Dropbox", enable the files.metadata.read and files.content.read permissions, then generate an access token. Without the variable, every command fails with an error naming it — before any request is made.

CLI

export DROPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN=…

npx @reneturcios/dropbrowse list /documents --max-files 50
npx @reneturcios/dropbrowse search invoice --types pdf --max-results 5
npx @reneturcios/dropbrowse read /documents/notes.txt --max-length 0
npx @reneturcios/dropbrowse info /documents/report.pdf
npx @reneturcios/dropbrowse grep "important keyword" /documents/file1.txt /documents/file2.md
npx @reneturcios/dropbrowse --version

Exit codes: 0 on success, 1 on a runtime error (including a missing token or an upstream failure), 2 on a usage error.

Related MCP server: Google Docs MCP Server

MCP server

npx -y @reneturcios/dropbrowse mcp

MCP client config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dropbrowse": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@reneturcios/dropbrowse", "mcp"],
      "env": { "DROPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN": "your_access_token_here" }
    }
  }
}

Tools

• list_files — List files and folders in a Dropbox directory. folder_path (optional; empty for root), max_files (optional, default 20).

• search_files — Search for files by name. query (required), file_types (optional: "all", "pdf", "docx", "txt", or comma-separated), max_results (optional, default 10).

• read_file — Read the full content of a file. file_path (required), max_length (optional, default 5000; 0 for unlimited).

• get_file_info — Get detailed metadata about a file. file_path (required).

• search_file_content — Search for text within specific files. file_paths (required list), query (required), context_chars (optional, default 100).

Text extraction — honest limit

Plain-text family files (TXT, MD, PY, JS, HTML, CSS, JSON, CSV, and other UTF-8 text) are read and searched as text. Reading or content-searching a PDF, DOC, or DOCX file returns a named error: binary-format text extraction is not implemented in this build.

Docker

docker run -i -e DROPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/dropbrowse
docker run --rm -e DROPBOX_ACCESS_TOKEN ghcr.io/cloudcorprecords/dropbrowse list /documents

Development

npm install
npm run build   # tsc -> dist/
npm test        # tsx --test test/*.test.ts (fake fetch only, no network)
npm run dev     # run the CLI from source

License

MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 Rene Turcios