I must confess I was ignorant. Recently I saw an application done by my colleague at work and it was using python WebDAV client. I was intrigued because for me WebDAV was connected with calendars (CalDAV) and contacts (CardDAV). And there I have WebDAV which is filesystem.

I decided to write this blog post about it for better understanding what it is. This is the first part of blog series about this extension to HTTP.

What is WebDAV and what is it useful for?

From wikipedia:

Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows clients to perform remote Web content authoring operations. (…)

The WebDAV protocol provides a framework for users to create, change and move documents on a server, typically a web server or web share.

In other words users that work with the server that implements WebDAV can share, move and edit files through a web server. There is also a way to lock file or get a specific revision of it. WebDAV is supported by many client applications like Windows Explorer or Nautilus. It is similar to another protocol- FTP. FTP is faster, but it doesn’t run on top of HTTP. WebDAV also support SSL and authentication.

CardDAV and CalDAV are extensions to WebDAV that enable client/server address book and to accessing the calendar on the remote server.

Setting up your own WebDAV server

I will set up basic WebDAV server using owncloud. Owncloud is a self-hosted solution for the cloud. In addition to this owncloud provides WebDAV server that I will use in the next blog post.

On owncloud download page, there is a lot of options to choose from but I choose appliances tab with OVA (open virtual application) image for VirtualBox. Installation is really simple just follow this manual.

After a while, you will have working owncloud served from VirtualBox. Now it’s time to play with WebDAV server. To check if this is working I will use CURL:

$ curl --user user:password 'http://localhost:8888/owncloud/remote.php/webdav/'
This is the WebDAV interface. It can only be accessed by WebDAV clients such as the ownCloud desktop sync client.⏎

To get properties about root folder:

$ curl --user user:password --include --request PROPFIND --header "Depth: 1"'http://localhost:8888/owncloud/remote.php/webdav'<?xml version="1.0"?><d:multistatusxmlns:d="DAV:"xmlns:s="http://sabredav.org/ns"xmlns:oc="http://owncloud.org/ns"><d:response><d:href>/owncloud/remote.php/webdav/</d:href><d:propstat><d:prop><d:getlastmodified>Thu, 08 Sep 2016 04:22:23 GMT</d:getlastmodified><d:resourcetype><d:collection/></d:resourcetype><d:quota-used-bytes>4756701</d:quota-used-bytes><d:quota-available-bytes>-3</d:quota-available-bytes><d:getetag>&quot;57d0e77f723e4&quot;</d:getetag></d:prop><d:status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</d:status></d:propstat></d:response><d:response><d:href>/owncloud/remote.php/webdav/Documents/</d:href><d:propstat><d:prop><d:getlastmodified>Thu, 08 Sep 2016 04:22:23 GMT</d:getlastmodified><d:resourcetype><d:collection/></d:resourcetype><d:quota-used-bytes>36227</d:quota-used-bytes><d:quota-available-bytes>-3</d:quota-available-bytes><d:getetag>&quot;57d0e77f4b534&quot;</d:getetag></d:prop><d:status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</d:status></d:propstat></d:response><d:response><d:href>/owncloud/remote.php/webdav/Photos/</d:href><d:propstat><d:prop><d:getlastmodified>Thu, 08 Sep 2016 04:22:23 GMT</d:getlastmodified><d:resourcetype><d:collection/></d:resourcetype><d:quota-used-bytes>678556</d:quota-used-bytes><d:quota-available-bytes>-3</d:quota-available-bytes><d:getetag>&quot;57d0e77f69116&quot;</d:getetag></d:prop><d:status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</d:status></d:propstat></d:response><d:response><d:href>/owncloud/remote.php/webdav/ownCloud%20Manual.pdf</d:href><d:propstat><d:prop><d:getlastmodified>Thu, 08 Sep 2016 04:22:23 GMT</d:getlastmodified><d:getcontentlength>4041918</d:getcontentlength><d:resourcetype/><d:getetag>&quot;1951114eecb977f35fb154c06dcfc4e0&quot;</d:getetag><d:getcontenttype>application/pdf</d:getcontenttype></d:prop><d:status>HTTP/1.1 200 OK</d:status></d:propstat></d:response></d:multistatus>

That’s all for this post! Next week as I got my server running I will be looking into python library for WebDAV. Feel free to comment- I really appreciate your feedback.

Special thanks to Kasia for being editor for this post. Thank you.