LÖVE

I'm making a database for an app I'm making, and I'd like to be able to make it autoupdate. I had the idea of making it read from a file I have saved in my dropbox public folder so it can update itself but dropbox links are all https, so http.request isn't working properly (it's returning a 503 and a redirect link, the redirect link being the link I gave it initally. I think this is because http.request just converts https addresses to http ones). Is there any way I can make it read from a HTTPS address while keeping it multi-platform?

You can just host a server to make http requests to. I think that would be the best way to do things. Other than that there really isn't a practical way to do https without making sure every platform has the proper binaries. For windows and Mac it should be fairly simple. You can use luajit-request with the curl binary. But on Linux the binary distribution would be a little more complicated, but if you get that to work then you can use luajit-request there as well