Comments on: Making WebDAV and NGINX Play Nice Together

By: Sanford

Sanford — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 06:13:01 +0000

Lots of good info here, thanks. Oldish post to comment on, but
something caught my eye that I think could use clarification. You
wrote

> when specifying a directory in HTTP, you must follow it with a slash
> (e.g. “http://example.com/directory/”, and not
> “http://example.com/directory”). Web browsers automatically account
> for these errors, which is why we never think about this sort of
> thing.

That’s not really accurate as-is — web browsers don’t themselves
account for missing trailing slashes, but rather the server either
redirects externally via 301/302 (which most GUI clients follow in
turn) or redirects internally by silently rewriting the URL. Web
browsers remain quite dumb in this regard, so people always cost some
overhead (non-negligible when 301/302 method is used) by leaving off
the trailing slash.

On the subject of the Windows WebDAV MiniRedir, _that’s_ actually the
better example of the client doing something of its own accord (not
something smart, to be sure). And in that case, the WDMR does not
follow the 301/302.

(Suspect you know all this, but your phrasing could maybe be
stronger.)

By: Evert

Evert — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:35:31 +0000

nginx won’t play nice with os/x, because the client uses chunked transfer encoding, which nginx doesn’t support for the request body (it does for the response).

Windows authentication can fail for a number of reasons. I documented a few here: http://code.google.com/p/sabredav/wiki/Windows

Hope it helps!

By: Renaud

Renaud — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:21:15 +0000

I also get the same issues as blake.
For MacOSX, it seems it’s an apple issue describe here: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20578
However, I cannot upload anything, MacOSX doesn’t issue any PUT request.

By: blake

blake — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:08:34 +0000

I was only able to get the Cadaver client to work with this script on nginx 0.7.61. Mac OS X seems to prepend ‘._’ to every PROPFIND requests it performs & Windows can’t get past HTTP authentication. These are probably nginx issues, and not related to this script. I’ll debug it more and post back with more information.

By: purab

purab — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:38:21 +0000

i tried following rule in my site,
if (-d $request_filename) { rewrite ^(.*[^/])$ $1/ break; }
if ($request_method = MKCOL) { rewrite ^(.*[^/])$ $1/ break; }

Tried this for removing ending slashes from site but seems like second rule is not working.
I am not able to use stylesheets and Jpg images and all links are accessible to that folder.
Means folder is not creating….
Please help me…..

By: Cliff Wells

Cliff Wells — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:52:59 +0000

I’m experimenting with pywebdav (http://code.google.com/p/pywebdav/). It seems to work well on its own (and claims to be fully DAV compliant), but I’ve had no luck proxying to it from Nginx. In any case, I expect once I get that working, it will be a decent substitute for Apache.

By: Marcus

Marcus — Sun, 17 May 2009 18:20:35 +0000

Hi,

WebDAV without apache is still something annoying. I didn’t find anything like a complete RFC-conform implementation of WebDAV yet. But i want a WebDAV-Server with a small footprint, like you. After doing some hours (days) testing WebDAV with lihttpd and now also nginx, i gave it up. Now, i wrote a “custom” start/stop script and a “small”/minimum Apache2 configuration with SSL and WebDAV. Just enough to serve 2-3 clients.

Your documentation was helpful as well, but it could be complete with this contribution about nginx + FastCGI:
http://tomasz.sterna.tv/2009/04/php-fastcgi-with-nginx-on-ubuntu/

Greetings,
Marcus.

By: links for 2009-03-23 « Bloggitation

links for 2009-03-23 « Bloggitation — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:02:47 +0000

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