WebDAV

WebDAV stands for 'Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning'. It is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.

Installation Instructions

Webdav support with Zeus version 4 is currently provided by Zope. The first step in enabling webdav is to get Zope correctly installed with Zeus. Please read the instructions on getting Zope setup and working correctly with Zeus.

Configuring WebDAV support with Zeus Web Server v4.1

To enable WebDAV for the /Zope directory you created when installing Zope you need to go to the "FastCGI" section of the virtual server (listed with the APIs).

On this page set the "Additional Methods Supported" entry from "None" to "WebDAV". Apply and commit these changes, and the /Zope directory will now respond to WebDAV requests.

If you configure additional directories to use WebDAV and want them to have different contents then you will need a separate instance of Zope for each individual set of contents.

Further instructions

To ensure that everything is working correctly, you should try to connect to the virtual server using a simple WebDAV client, such as Cadaver (http://www.webdav.org/cadaver).

A request of: "cadaver http://YourSite:YourPort/" should not give any errors, and you should be able to type "ls" and get a listing similar to this:

Listing collection `/': succeeded.
Coll:  Control_Panel                           0  Jan 20 21:39
Coll:  QuickStart                              0  Jan 20 21:39
       acl_users                               0  Dec 30  1998
       index_html                            654  Jan 20 21:39
       standard_error_message               1365  Jan 20 21:39
       standard_html_footer                   53  Jan 20 21:39
       standard_html_header                   80  Jan 20 21:39

Cadaver is a powerful WebDAV client, allowing you to "put" (upload) files to the server. A full list of commands are available by typing "help" from the cadaver command line.

In order to get the WebDAV functionality from Zope, it is necessary for every request, both from authors uploading, and clients downloading, to be passed to the Zope handler.

There may be circumstances where this may not be a desirable situation. Under these circumstances we recommend that two websites be created. One website will be a development site which is WebDAV enabled and the other will be the live site which is not WebDAV enabled.

As Zope stores all of the files it serves in a database ($ZOPEHOME/var/Data.fs) there is no trivial way to copy the files from the Zope site to a different virtual server. The easiest solution to this problem is to enable the Zope FTP server. This is done by changing the Zope "start" script so that the "-f -" flag reads "-f 1234" where 1234 is the port you wish the FTP server to run on.

Once the Zope FTP server is up and running it should be simple to configure a program such as mirror to keep the contents of the live website synchronized with the production site.

Content Manager [Administrator] 16 December 2005