Apache Cookbook, 2nd Edition

2.2. Installing mod_dav on a Unixish System

Problem

You want to add or enable WebDAV capabilities to your server. WebDAV permits specific documents to be reliably and securely manipulated by remote users without the need for FTP, to perform such tasks as adding, deleting, or updating files.

Solution

If you’re using Apache 2.0 or later, mod_dav is automatically available, although you may need to enable it at compile time with --enable-dav.

If you are using Apache 1.3, download and unpack the mod_dav source package from http://webdav.org/mod_dav/, and then:

% cd mod_dav-1.0.3-1.3.6
% ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs
% make
#make install

Restart the server, and be sure to read Recipe 6.18.

Discussion

The mod_dav source package is an encapsulated and well-behaved module that is easily built and added to an existing server. To test that it has been properly installed, you need to enable some location on the server for WebDAV management and verify access to that location with some WebDAV-capable tool. We recommend cadaver, which is an open source command-line WebDAV tool. (The URL for the cadaver tool is found at the end of this recipe.)

To enable your server for WebDAV operations, you need to add at least two directives to your httpd.conf file. The first identifies the location of the locking database used by mod_dav to keep WebDAV operations from interfering with each other; it needs to be in a directory that is writable by the server. For example:

# cd /usr/local/apache # ...