by toomuchtodo on 10/24/25, 7:09 PM with 99 comments
by nickcw on 10/25/25, 10:45 PM
The RFCs for WebDAV are better than those for FTP but there is still an awful lot of not fully specified stuff which servers and clients choose to do differently which leads to lots of workarounds.
The protocol doesn't let you set modification times by default which is important for a sync tool, but popular implementations like owncloud and nextcloud do. Likewise with hashes.
However the protocol is very fast, much faster than SFTP with it's homebrew packetisation as it's based on well optimised web tech, HTTP, TLS etc.
by 93n on 10/26/25, 4:01 PM
I like WebDAV because it 'just works' with the mTLS infra I had already setup on my homelab for access from the outside world.
I use sftpgo (https://sftpgo.com/) on the server side.
by rapnie on 10/26/25, 9:56 AM
Use it where it makes sense. And S3 does not necessarily equate to using Amazon. I like the Garage S3 project that is interesting for smaller scale uses and self-hosted systems. The project is funded with EU Horizon grants via NLnet.
by ctippett on 10/25/25, 10:26 PM
Tailscale's drive share feature is implemented as a WebDAV share (connect to http://100.100.100.100:8080). You can also connect to Fastmail's file storage over WebDAV.
WebDAV is neat.
by donatj on 10/26/25, 10:14 AM
Both Windows and Mac have 9p support built in and both have locked away from the end user. Windows has it exclusively for communication with WSL. macOS has 9p but it's exclusively for communication with it's virtualization system. It would be amazing if I could just mount 9p from the UI.
by dabinat on 10/26/25, 9:40 AM
by mid1221213 on 10/25/25, 10:05 PM
Have a look there: https://codeberg.org/lunae/dav-next
/!\ it's a WIP, thus not packaged anywhere yet, no binary release, etc… but all feedback welcome
by cricalix on 10/25/25, 9:02 PM
Exhibit A: https://help.ovhcloud.com/csm/en-ie-web-hosting-ftp-storage-...
by 1123581321 on 10/25/25, 9:34 PM
by sylens on 10/25/25, 8:59 PM
by netsharc on 10/25/25, 9:52 PM
by cyberpunk on 10/25/25, 9:49 PM
The go stdlib has quite a good one that just works with only a small bit of wrapping in a main() etc.
Although ive since written one in elixir that seems to handle my traffic better..
(you can also mount them on macos and browse with finder / shell etc which is pretty nice)
by sunaookami on 10/25/25, 10:18 PM
by Tractor8626 on 10/25/25, 4:30 AM
Sftpgo also supports webdav, but for use cases in the article sftp is just better.
by williamjackson on 10/25/25, 9:24 PM
by ycui1986 on 10/26/25, 1:33 AM
by warabe on 10/25/25, 10:19 PM
We need to keep using open protocols such as WebDAV instead of depending on proprietary APIs like the S3 API.
by citruspi on 10/26/25, 12:48 AM
by indigodaddy on 10/25/25, 3:45 AM
by throwaway87502 on 10/26/25, 12:16 AM
There is also NzbDav for this too, https://github.com/nzbdav-dev/nzbdav
by tealpod on 10/26/25, 6:34 AM
by jFriedensreich on 10/26/25, 9:14 AM
by adriatp on 10/26/25, 6:18 AM
by mastax on 10/25/25, 9:04 PM
by aborsy on 10/26/25, 2:19 AM
You can run a WebDAV server using caddy easily.
by warpspin on 10/26/25, 8:27 AM
Not sure he ever tried supporting that. We once did and it was a nightmare. People couldn't handle it at all even with screenshotted manuals.
My personal experience says that even the dumbest user is able to use FileZilla successfully, and therefore SFTP, while people just don't get the built-in WebDAV support of the OSes.
I also vaguely recall that WebDAV in Windows had quite a bit of randomly appearing problems and performance issues. But this was all a while ago, might have improved since then.
by CyberDildonics on 10/26/25, 1:03 PM
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents directly in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for concurrency control and namespace operations, thus allowing the Web to be viewed as a writeable, collaborative medium and not just a read-only medium.[1] WebDAV is defined in RFC 4918 by a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
by mightysashiman on 10/26/25, 12:53 PM
Says who?
by jeroenhd on 10/25/25, 10:00 PM
It's a shame the protocol never found much use in commercial services. There would be little need for official clients running in compatibity layers like you see with tools like Gqdrive and OneDrive on Linux. Frankly, except for the lack of standardised random writes, the protocol is still one of the better solutions in this space.
I have no idea how S3 managed to win as the "standard" API for so many file storage solutions. WebDAV has always been right there.
by PunchyHamster on 10/25/25, 10:57 PM
Hahahaha, haha, ha, no. And probably (still)more used than WebDAV
pls send help
by ksk23 on 10/26/25, 10:13 AM
by rubatuga on 10/25/25, 2:33 AM
by latchkey on 10/26/25, 2:19 AM
https://github.com/lookfirst/sardine
Still going.
by Velocifyer on 10/26/25, 12:15 AM
by cyberax on 10/25/25, 10:15 PM
What else?
by panny on 10/26/25, 12:19 AM
And yet, I can never seem to find a decent java lib for webdav/caldav/carddav. Every time I look for one, I end up wanting to write my own instead. Then it just seems like the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
by sublinear on 10/25/25, 3:01 AM
The last time I had to deal with WebDAV was for a crusty old CMS nobody liked using many years ago. The support on dev machines running Windows and Mac was a bit sketchy and would randomly have files skipped during bulk uploads. Linux support was a little better with davfs2, but then VSCode would sometimes refuse to recognize the mount without restarting.
None of that workflow made sense. It was hard to know what version of a file was uploaded and doing any manual file management just seemed silly. The project later moved to GitLab. A CI job now simply SFTPs files upon merge into the main branch. This is a much more familiar workflow to most web devs today and there's no weird jank.