NCscripts

The nxget.py script is a command-line application to download data from NextCloud. It's written in Python and makes use of the NextCloud webdav API.

Installation

The script is written in python3 and only makes use of the requests package. If you do not have write access to your main python installation, or you do not want to add packages to your system installation you can create a user python installation:

python3 -m venv env
source ./env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

This should result in your local python3 being ready to use.

Usage

nxget.py -h -v [-l <output-files>] [[-f <input-files>] -g <local folder>] -a <username>:<pass> -s <since-date> -u <until-date> -o <nextcloud file> <nextcloud folder>

Arguments:
<nextcloud folder>       The NextCloud folder containing the data. The argument is not needed if the '-f' option is used with '-g'.
                         Or, if the '-o' option is used.

Options
-h                       Print this help.
-v                       Print verbose output.
-o <nextcloud file>      Download <nextcloud file> from NextCloud. This must be a single file.
-l <output-files>        Print the list of files in the folder to the output-files JSON file.
-f <input-files>         Use as input the JSON file list of files to download.
-g <local folder>        Download the files to the local folder.
-a <username>:<pass>     Username and password for the account.
-s <since-date>          Select files modified starting from and including this date. Format: YYYY-MM-DD
-u <until-date>          Select files modified before and including this date. Format: YYYY-MM-DD

The script can be used in 3 modes:

To get a list of files to download

./nxget.py -l output_files.json -a username:pass https://nextcloud/user/folder

This will result in a JSON file output_files.json to be created with the list of files to download in the folder https://nextcloud/user/folder. The script will contain files in that directory and all files in subdirectories.

You can use the -s (since) and -u (until) options to restrict the listing to certain date ranges. The format for the dates is YYYY-MM-DD. Note if you want to get the files on a particular day (eg 10 Mar 2020) then you need to specify -s 2020-03-10 -u 2020-03-11 as the dates are taken from 00:00 on that day.

To download a list of files

./nxget.py -f output_files.json -a username:pass -g somedir

This will download the files contained in the JSON file output_files.json into the directory somedir. Depending on the network it can take sometime to complete. If the download fails part-way through you can re-run the script. It will skip the successful downloads and only download files that have an incorrect filesize (according to the file size metadata information in the JSON file).

To download files belonging to a folder

Instead of first getting a list of files and then downloading the list you can run the script to perform both tasks in one go.

./nxget.py -g somedir -a username:pass https://nextcloud/user/folder

This will download all the files in the folder https://nextcloud/user/folder and in subfolders and store the files under the directory somedir. This may be more convenient if you have a good network connection.

To download an individual file

You can download a single file using the command:

./nxget.py -g somedir -a username:pass -o https://nextcloud/user/folder/file.dat

This will download the file https://nextcloud/user/folder/file.dat into the directory somedir.