WebDAV with NGINX

Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is an extension to the standard HTTP protocol that allows remote authoring commands, such as the ability to lock, upload, delete, and create content.

This content can be in the form of documents, images, objects, and more. While its popularity has declined with the rapid update of full CMSes and cloud storage platforms such as Dropbox, WebDAV still remains a very simple option to implement solutions.

Getting ready

The standard NGINX installation only includes basic WebDAV support; however, we can extend it to provide the full functionality by compiling a custom module. At the time of writing, the extended module hadn't been converted into a dynamic module, so we need to recompile all of NGINX.

Firstly, we will download the source for NGINX and prepare it for compilation:

mkdir /tmp/nginxbuildcd /tmp/nginxbuildyumdownloader --source nginx

Then, we will download a copy of the extension so that it can be included in the source build...