Today, Heroku announced the ability to deploy apps directly from Dropbox!
They're calling this feature Dropbox Sync, and it's available in beta right now. You can read the full details about the feature on the Heroku blog.
How it works
Heroku uses the /delta endpoint to determine what files have changed in Dropbox. Developers may then click a "Deploy" button in the Heroku dashboard to kick off a deployment.
Changes made by one user can be synced with a collaborator's Dropbox. Similarly, changes made via git (Heroku's other deployment protocol) are pushed to Dropbox and vice versa. This syncing back and forth could potentially lead to conflicts so Heroku is using Dropbox's built-in mechanism for flagging " conflicted copy" files, and then asking users to resolve such conflicts before deploying from Dropbox again. See the Dropbox Sync article in Heroku's Dev Center for more details on collaboration and conflict resolution.
You can do this too
Heroku built this feature themselves using the existing functionality in the Core API. We've seen quite a few companies build similar integrations with Dropbox to deploy code, content, or other assets. This kind of content syncing and deployment is a growing use case for the Dropbox API, so we're always working hard to make it even easier to build. For example, we recently added webhooks so each file save can trigger an event such as a code deploy.
Give it a try in your own product, and let us know if you run into trouble!
