Purpose of WebDAV?

One of the reasons I became a DreamHost customer was because of the WebDAV support, which is extremely rare among hosting providers at this price. I wanted to be able to mount my website as if it were a local drive on my Mac so that I could easily edit and add files. After enabling WebDAV on a directory, however, I discovered a problem: I have to password-protect the directory to prevent others from editing it, but in order for others to view it, I have to remove password protection. Because of this Catch-22, there seems to be no way of giving me write access to the directory while allowing read-only access for everyone else. For this reason, WebDAV is pretty much useless to me.

Am I missing something? What do other DreamHost customers use WebDAV for?

You don't have to password protect it (.htaccess password protect). Just make sure not to check the password protect button when you set it up.

But I wouldn't really use webdav for that anyway. Scripts and such cannot run inside a webdav directory (or that's what I've heard, haven't tried it though).

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> You don't have to password protect it

Right, but then anyone could modify and delete files. That's certainly not what I want. I just want to allow read/write privileges for myself and read-only privileges for everyone else. I know this is possible because Apple's .Mac service is set up this way, and they use WebDAV.

> But I wouldn't really use webdav for that anyway.

What would you use it for?

When you set up a WebDAV directory, write access to it is always restricted to the users you configure. The password protection option is for when you also want to restrict read access. The latter is good for sharing private calendars with other people, for instance. So, the answer is to not check the password protect box. Your files will still be safe!


Note though that WebDAV runs as apache so you won't be able to run cgi scripts or manage the files in any way other than through WebDAV.

- Dallas
- DreamHost Head Honcho/Founder

Ahhh... it worked, thanks! I simply turned off the password protection, as you said, and specified a user account with a password, and everything worked just as I wanted: I could see the files in my web browser without a password, and if I tried to connect with a WebDAV client, it prompted me for a password and allowed me write access! Sweet...