WebDAV notes

Intro

WebDAV is an extension of HTTP, adding concepts like resources, collections, permissions, and locks.

This has mostly been used to model files, directories - and exchange of such, seen e.g. as

• remote shares
• one way of talking subversion
• file syncing like in owncloud/nextcloud

Command line clients

rclone

supports various interfaces

does parallel transfers

allows filtering a la rsync's

seems better behaved around large amounts of files than duck is

messages could be made more human-readable and/or computer-parseable

transfers while figuring out what to sync. Can be much faster than preparing first

https://rclone.org/

duck

https://duck.sh/

(supports the various protocols that cyberduck does)

parallel transfers itself

starts transfers only after completely preparing it. Worst case this can take much longer

https://trac.cyberduck.io/wiki/help/en/howto/cli

Cadaver (*nix, cygwin)

interface like CLI ftp

http://www.webdav.org/cadaver/

curl/libcurl (win, lin, osx, more[1])

https://curl.haxx.se/

(Haven't looked at yet):

Davix (lin, osx)

https://dmc.web.cern.ch/projects/davix/home

kioclient cp file.txt 'webdavs://user@webdav.example.com:443/'

DavCopy (win)

http://www.jamesitsolutions.com/techtips/davcopy.htm

nd

less featured than e.g. cadaver

hdav

low on features?

rclone notes

rclone aims to be an rsync-alike for a few handfuls of cloudy services.

..in that it selects by mtime+size (not the rolling-hash changes). Note that plain WebDAV does not expose mtime, but owncloud and nextcoud do and this is supported.

By default it will parallelize, and retry a bunch, so is relatively fast and robust.

To use:

• Download from https://rclone.org/downloads/

• create a named configuration for your remote site (stores an ini-like file in a place like ~/.config/rclone/rclone.conf), via

rclone config

Use the various subcommands, e.g.

rclone copy /home/source remotename:dirname    # copy to or from a remote location
rclone ls remote:                              # list directories (lsd), trees (ls)

Note that you can use filtering imitating rsync's, e.g.

rclone copy /local remote:rpath -f '+ *.jpg' -f '- *'

And tricks like

rclone lsf --files-only -R --format p remote:path >flist.txt #, editing that file, and doing
rclone copy remote:path local/path -v --include-from flist.txt

Notes:

• use -n (--dry-run) to check that filtering does what you think it does

• --stats timespec gives you that '#errors, #checked, #transferred, transferring:' summary at the given interval

(currently) only appears when also using -v

though in recent versions you can get it without -v via --stats timespec' --stats-log-level NOTICE

• --log-level is similar to -v

-vv is DEBUG

-v is INFO

default is NOTICE (prints mostly errors)

-q is ERROR

See also:

• https://rclone.org/
• https://rclone.org/webdav/

duck notes

Don't use relative paths, it gets confused by them, with less-than-useful errors.

--existing / -e

• -e resume appends existing files
• -e skip skips files that exist at all
• -e compare skips files that match size and modification date (and protocol allowing, checksum(verify))
• -e overwrite overwrites all files that exist already
• -e cancel
• -e similar
• -e rename uploads under a filename with a timestamp

See also:

• https://duck.sh/
• https://blog.cyberduck.io/2015/01/15/terminal/

curl notes

https://code.blogs.iiidefix.net/posts/webdav-with-curl/

GUI clients

Cyberduck (win, osx) (free)

WinSCP (win) (free)

KDE's conqueror (linux)

GNOME (linux)

• File > Connect to

note: start the URL with dav: or davs:

Unsorted

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/authoring/implementation.html

Mounting

davfs2 notes

uses neon

package name is davfs2

filesystem in fstab is is davfs