WebDAV Filesystem Implementation
The WebDAV filesystem implementation is arguably the best sort of WebDAV client. It’s implemented as a low-level filesystem module, typically within the operating system’s kernel. This means that the DAV share is mounted like any other network filesystem, similar to mounting an NFS share on Unix or attaching an SMB share as a drive letter in Windows. As a result, this sort of client provides completely transparent read/write WebDAV access to all programs. Applications aren’t even aware that WebDAV requests are happening.
WebDrive, NetDrive
Both WebDrive and NetDrive are excellent commercial products that allow a WebDAV share to be attached as drive letters in Windows. As a result, you can operate on the contents of these WebDAV-backed pseudodrives as easily as you can against real local hard drives, and in the same ways. You can purchase WebDrive from South River Technologies (http://www.southrivertech.com). Novell’s NetDrive is freely available online, but it requires users to have a NetWare license.
Mac OS X
Apple’s OS X operating system has an integrated filesystem-level WebDAV
client. From the Finder, select the menu item. Enter a
WebDAV URL, and it appears as a disk on the desktop, just like any
other mounted volume. You can also mount a WebDAV share from the
Darwin terminal by using the webdav
filesystem type with the mount
command:
$ mount -t webdav http://svn.example.com/repos/project /some/mountpoint $
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 OS X insists on locking support for read/write shares, and the ability to lock files first appeared in Subversion 1.2.
Also, 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
Linux davfs2 is a filesystem module for the Linux kernel, whose development is organized at http://dav.sourceforge.net/. Once you install davfs2, you can mount a WebDAV network share using the usual Linux mount command:
$ mount.davfs http://host/repos /mnt/dav