Accessing WebDAV Folders on Linux?

Posted by Cliff on Thursday May 9, 2002 @06:03PM from the interoperation-GOOOD! dept.

Saqib Ali asks: "I was wondering if any Slashdot readers are accessing WebDAV folders on their Linux box. I heavily use DAV folders to store files and documents. On a Windows machine, I can easily access them using WebFolder or native DAV support in MS Office Suite. But when I switch to my Linux box, I have a hard time accessing the files on the DAV folders. I haven't seen any application on Linux that support DAV natively. OpenOffice/StartOffice don't support DAV either. I know there is nautilus which uses gnome-vfs to access files on DAV, but that doesn't help if the apps don't support DAV themselves. Are there Linux app that support DAV natively? How about integerating gnome-vfs into OpenOffice? Any ideas?" For those who just want access to the files, and don't mind the extra steps, you can use utilities like Cadaver but probably, what many of you might be looking for is a simple file system driver. What are you usin to access your DAV resources?

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davfs works well... by sshambar · 2002-05-09 20:36 · Score: 5, Informative

I've been using DavFS for awhile now. It is a kernel modules which allows you to mount a dav location as a filesystem -- which pretty much allows any app to use the dav.

It was easy enough to compile for my RH7.1 system, you just need the kernel headers installed, and you can build/install the module, and then use mount.davfs to mount a location just like a samba share. It supports user auth. and you can compile in ssl support (a must in my book :)

My only issue is that you need to choose your mount point carefully, as an 'ls' even on the directory containing the mount point can take a second or two to complete (since the fs needs to perform a propget on the server); so I suggest placing your mount point in a subdirectory that you will only access when you're doing dav work... (ie not in your home directory). Other than that, it's great. I love it especially because it very tolerant of the server restarting/going offline, since it's just http gets and doesn't have any "state" like nfs.

I've also mounting the drives on XP and OSX, which makes sharing documents (even securely to my office box over ssl) very cool. And setting up a dav share is just like setting up any other web location in apache (I use the mod_dav that ships with RH7.2 for my server...)

In short, very cool stuff.