Generate an access token for your own account

A Faster Way to Start Testing the Dropbox API

Developers exploring the Dropbox API often want to try calls against their own account before building the full OAuth flow for real users. Setting up that flow just to run a few experiments adds unnecessary friction. To address this, the Dropbox App Console now includes a button that generates an OAuth 2 access token for your own account, with no additional setup required.

The new control appears in the App Console for any Dropbox API app:

Clicking the button returns an OAuth 2 access token you can use immediately in API calls. For example, this curl command retrieves the account info for your own account:

curl https://api.dropbox.com/1/account/info -H "Authorization:Bearer <YOUR-ACCESS-TOKEN>"

The equivalent logic in Ruby looks like this:

require 'dropbox_sdk'
client = DropboxClient.new("<YOUR-ACCESS-TOKEN>")
puts client.account_info()["display_name"]

Keep in mind that a token generated this way is scoped to your own Dropbox account only. When your application moves beyond development and serves other users, you must switch to the standard OAuth authorization flow to obtain tokens on behalf of each user.