On Windows, there are several well-known applications that contain integrated WebDAV client functionality, such as Microsoft's Office, ^[52] Adobe's Photoshop, and Macromedia's Dreamweaver programs. They're able to directly open and save to URLs, and tend to make heavy use of WebDAV locks when editing a file.

Note that while many of these programs also exist for the Mac OS X, they do not appear to support WebDAV directly on that platform. In fact, on Mac OS X, the File->Open dialog box doesn't allow one to type a path or URL at all. It's likely that the WebDAV features were deliberately left out of Macintosh versions of these programs, since OS X already provides such excellent low-level filesystem support for WebDAV.

Cadaver is a bare-bones Unix commandline program for browsing and changing WebDAV shares. Like the Subversion client, it uses the neon HTTP library—not surprisingly, both neon and cadaver are written by the same author. Cadaver is free software (GPL license) and is available at http://www.webdav.org/cadaver/.

Using cadaver is similar to using a commandline FTP program, and thus it's extremely useful for basic WebDAV debugging. It can be used to upload or download files in a pinch, and also to examine properties, copy, move, lock or unlock files:

$ cadaver http://host/repos
dav:/repos/> ls
Listing collection `/repos/': succeeded.
Coll: > foobar                                 0  May 10 16:19
      > playwright.el                       2864  May  4 16:18
      > proofbypoem.txt                     1461  May  5 15:09
      > westcoast.jpg                      66737  May  5 15:09

dav:/repos/> put README
Uploading README to `/repos/README':
Progress: [=============================>] 100.0% of 357 bytes succeeded.

dav:/repos/> get proofbypoem.txt
Downloading `/repos/proofbypoem.txt' to proofbypoem.txt:
Progress: [=============================>] 100.0% of 1461 bytes succeeded.

DAV Explorer is another standalone WebDAV client, written in Java. It's under a free Apache-like license and is available at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~webdav/. DAV Explorer does everything cadaver does, but has the advantages of being portable and being more user-friendly GUI application. It's also one of the first clients to support the new WebDAV Access Control Protocol (RFC 3744).

Of course, DAV Explorer's ACL support is useless in this case, since mod_dav_svn doesn't support it. The fact that both Cadaver and DAV Explorer support some limited DeltaV commands isn't particularly useful either, since they don't allow MKACTIVITY requests. But it's not relevant anyway; we're assuming all of these clients are operating against an autoversioning repository.

Microsoft was one of the original backers of the WebDAV specification, and first started shipping a client in Windows 98, known as “Web Folders”. This client was also shipped in Windows NT4 and 2000.

The original Web Folders client was an extension to Explorer, the main GUI program used to browse filesystems. It works well enough. In Windows 98, the feature might need to be explicitly installed if Web Folders aren't already visible inside “My Computer”. In Windows 2000, simply add a new “network place”, enter the URL, and the WebDAV share will pop up for browsing.

With the release of Windows XP, Microsoft started shipping a new implementation of Web Folders, known as the “WebDAV mini-redirector”. The new implementation is a filesystem-level client, allowing WebDAV shares to be mounted as drive letters. Unfortunately, this implementation is incredibly buggy. The client usually tries to convert http URLs (http://host/repos) into UNC share notation (\\host\repos); it also often tries to use Windows Domain authentication to respond to basic-auth HTTP challenges, sending usernames as HOST\username. These interoperability problems are severe and documented in numerous places around the web, to the frustration of many users. Even Greg Stein, the original author of Apache's WebDAV module, recommends against trying to use XP Web Folders against an Apache server.

It turns out that the original “Explorer-only” Web Folders implementation isn't dead in XP, it's just buried. It's still possible to find it by using this technique:

There are a number of other rumored workarounds to the problems, but none of them seem to work on all versions and patchlevels of Windows XP. In our tests, only the previous algorithm seems to work consistently on every system. The general consensus of the WebDAV community is that you should avoid the new Web Folders implementation and use the old one instead, and that if you need real a real filesystem-level client for Windows XP, then use a third-party program like WebDrive or NetDrive.

A final tip: if you're attempting to use XP Web Folders, make sure you have the absolute latest version from Microsoft. For example, Microsoft released a bug-fixed version in January 2005, available at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=892211. In particular, this release is known to fix a bug whereby browsing a DAV share shows an unexpected infinite recursion.

Nautilus is the official file manager/browser for the GNOME desktop (http://www.gnome.org), and Konqueror is the manager/browser for KDE desktop (http://www.kde.org). Both of these applications have an explorer-level WebDAV client built-in, and operate just fine against an autoversioning repository.

In GNOME's Nautilus, from the File menu, select Open location and enter the URL. The repository should then be displayed like any other filesystem.

In KDE's Konqueror, you need to use the webdav:// scheme when entering the URL in the location bar. If you enter an http:// URL, Konqueror will behave like an ordinary web browser. You'll likely see the generic HTML directory listing produced by mod_dav_svn. By entering webdav://host/repos instead of http://host/repos, Konqueror becomes a WebDAV client and displays the repository as a filesystem.

Both WebDrive and NetDrive are excellent commercial products which allows a WebDAV share to be attached as drive letters in Windows. We've had nothing but success with these products. At the time of writing, WebDrive can be purchased from South River Technologies (http://www.southrivertech.com). NetDrive ships with Netware, is free of charge, and can be found by searching the web for “netdrive.exe”. Though it is freely available online, users are required to have a Netware license. (If any of that sounds odd to you, you're not alone. See this page on Novell's website: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/qna/999.html)

Apple's OS X operating system has an integrated filesystem-level WebDAV client. From the Finder, select the Connect to Server item from the Go menu. Enter a WebDAV URL, and it appears as a disk on the desktop, just like any other mounted volume.^[53].

Note that if your mod_dav_svn is older than version 1.2, OS X will refuse to mount the share as read-write; it will appear as read-only. This is because the OS X insists on locking support for read-write shares, and the ability to lock files first appeared in Subversion 1.2.

One more word of warning: OS X's WebDAV client can sometimes be overly sensitive to HTTP redirects. If OS X is unable to mount the repository at all, you may need to enable the BrowserMatch directive in the Apache server's httpd.conf:

BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.[012]" redirect-carefully

Linux davfs2 is a filesystem module for the Linux kernel, whose development is located at http://dav.sourceforge.net/. Once installed, a WebDAV network share can be mounted with the usual Linux mount command:

$ mount.davfs http://host/repos /mnt/dav