I wrote both the WebDAV client (backend) for rclone and the WebDAV server. This means you can sync to and from WebDAV servers or mount them just fine. You can also expose your filesystem as a WebDAV server (or your S3 bucket or Google Drive etc).
The RFCs for WebDAV are better than those for FTP but there is still an awful lot of not fully specified stuff which servers and clients choose to do differently which leads to lots of workarounds.
The protocol doesn't let you set modification times by default which is important for a sync tool, but popular implementations like owncloud and nextcloud do. Likewise with hashes.
However the protocol is very fast, much faster than SFTP with it's homebrew packetisation as it's based on well optimised web tech, HTTP, TLS etc.
I wonder how you would compare it to nfs (which I believe can be TCP based, and probably encrypted)
Not that it is a good comparison. NFS isn't super popular, macos can do it, I don't think windows can. But both windows and macos can do webdav.
> In fact, you're already using WebDAV and you just don't realize it.
Tailscale's drive share feature is implemented as a WebDAV share (connect to http://100.100.100.100:8080). You can also connect to Fastmail's file storage over WebDAV.
WebDAV is neat.
I use it all the time to mount my CopyParty instance. Works great!
On the same topic, and because I believe too that WebDAV is not dead, far from it, I published a WIP lastly, part of a broader project, that is an nginx module that does WebDAV file server and is compatible with NextCloud sync clients, desktop & Android. It can be used with Gnome Online Accounts too, as well as with Nautilus (and probably others), as a WebDAV server.
Have a look there: https://codeberg.org/lunae/dav-next
/!\ it's a WIP, thus not packaged anywhere yet, no binary release, etc… but all feedback welcome
I built a simple WebDAV server with Sabre to sync Devonthink databases. WebDAV was the only option that synced between users of multiple iCloud accounts, worked anywhere in the world and didn’t require a Dropbox subscription. It’s a faster sync than CloudKit. I don’t have other WebDAV use cases but I expect this one to run without much maintenance or cost for years. Useful protocol.
iOS DevonThink sync WebDAV has been reliable, fast, maintained, non-subscription and includes a web scraper. Good for saving LLM chatbot markdown.
"FTP is dead" - shared web hosting would like a word. Quite a few web hosts still talk about using FTP to upload websites to the hosting server. Yes, these days you can upload SSH keys and possibly use SFTP, but the docs still talk about tools like FileZilla and basic FTP.
Exhibit A: https://help.ovhcloud.com/csm/en-ie-web-hosting-ftp-storage-...
I haven't used old school FTP in probably 15 years. Surely we're not talking about using that unencrypted protocol in 2025?
From that link:
2. SSH connection
You will need advanced knowledge and an OVHcloud web hosting plan Pro or Performance to use this access type.
Well, maybe we are. I'd cross that provider off my list right there.
They mention that the "FTP" service includes SFTP, which is file transfer over SSH (not actually related to classic FTP), which is perfectly secure and supported by most FTP clients like Filezilla.
The premium "SSH connection" you mentioned seems to refer to shell access via SSH, which is a separate thing.
FTP still works great and encryption is a non-priority for 100% of users.
It should be priority for hosting companies though since leaked credentials and websites hosting malware is a problem.
Transport encryption should be a huge priority for everyone. It's completely unacceptable to continue using unencrypted protocols over the public internet.
Especially for the use case of transferring files to and from the backend of a web host. Not using it in that scenario is freely handing over control over your backend to everything in between you and the host, putting everyone at risk in the process.
> It's completely unacceptable to continue using unencrypted protocols over the public internet.
That is nonsense. The reality is that most data simply is not sensitive, and there is no valid reason to encrypt it. I wouldn't use insecure FTP because credentials, but there's no good reason to encrypt your blog or something.
I'd argue that most people like knowing that what they receive is what the original server sent(and vice versa) but maybe you enjoy ads enough to prefer having your ISP put more of it on the websites you use?
Jokes aside https is as much about privacy as is is about reducing the chance you receive data that has been tampered. You shouldn't only not use FTP because credentials but also because embedded malware you didn't put there yourself.
Agree but also wonder if ISPs bother with this anymore, now that almost all websites are https.
I, for one, would like to see an ISP dedicated enough and tecnically able to inject ads in my FTP stream. :)
Shared hosting is dying, but not yet dead; FTP is dying with it - it's really the last big use case for FTP now that software distribution and academia have moved away from FTP. As shared hosting continues to decline in popularity, FTP is going along with it.
Like you, I will miss the glory days of FTP :'(
I think the true death of ftp was amazon s3 deciding to use their own protocol instead of ftp, as s3 is basically the same niche.
Shared hosting is in decline in much the same way as it was in 2015. Aka everyone involved is still making money hand over fist despite continued reports of its death right around the corner.
The number of shared hosting providers has drastically declined since the 2000s. I would posit that things like squarespace/hosted wordpress took the lion share, with the advent of $5-10 VPS filling the remaining niches.
The remaining hosting companies certainly still make a lot of money, a shared hosting business is basically on autopilot once set up (I used to own one, hence why I still track the market) and they can be overcommitted like crazy.
No, not at all the case. There has been continued consolidation of the shared hosting space, plus consumer interest in "a website" has declined sharply now that small businesses just feel that they need an instagram to get started. Combine that with site builders eating at shared hosting's market share, and it's not looking good for the future of the "old school" shared hosting industry that you are thinking of.
Seems short sighted, a lot of older people and privacy conscious people of all ages avoid social media. But I guess if they are sustaining a business on only Instagram, good for them.
I use webdav for serving media over tailscale to infuse when I'm on the move. SMB did not play nicely at all and nfs is not supported..
The go stdlib has quite a good one that just works with only a small bit of wrapping in a main() etc.
Although ive since written one in elixir that seems to handle my traffic better..
(you can also mount them on macos and browse with finder / shell etc which is pretty nice)
Author seems to conflate S3 API with S3 itself. Most vendors are now including S3 API compatibility into their product because people are so used to using that as a model
They do mention S3-compatible servers later in the post. It really seems to be about protocol itself.
More like attempt at S3 API compatibility...
I was about to make a very similar comment.
There really is nothing wrong with the S3 API and the complaints about Minio and S3 are basically irrelevant. It’s an API that dozens of solutions implement.
Recently set up WebDAV for my Paperless-NGX instance so my scanner can directly upload scans to Paperless. I wish Caddy would support WebDAV out of the box, had to use this extension: https://github.com/mholt/caddy-webdav
Which scanner, if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve got a decade+ old ix500 that had cloud support but not local SMB.
One interesting use of WebDAV is SysInternals (which is a collection of tools for Windows), it's accessible from Windows Explorer via WebDAV by going to \\live.sysinternals.com\Tools
Isn't that SMB, not webdav?
I guess the "\\$HOSTNAME\$DIR" URL syntax in Windows Explorer also works for WebDAV. Is it safe to have SMB over WAN?
I just tried https://live.sysinternals.com/Tools in Windows Explorer, and it also lists the files, identical to how it would show the contents of any directory.
Even running "dir \\live.sysinternals.com\Tools", or starting a program from the command prompt like "\\live.sysinternals.com\Tools\tcpview64" works.
IIRC, Windows for a while had native WebDAV support in Explorer, but setting it up was very non-obvious. Not sure if it still does, since I've moved fully to Linux.
I was surprised, then not really surprised, when I found out this week that Tailscale's native file sharing feature, Taildrive, is implemented as a WebDAV server in the network.
https://tailscale.com/kb/1369/taildrive
What else would you expect, just out of curiosity? SMB? NFS? SSHFS?
A proprietary binary patented protocol...
and do what, implement virtual filesystem driver for every OS ?
If you need sftp independent of unix auth - there is sftpgo.
Sftpgo also supports webdav, but for use cases in the article sftp is just better.
> While writing this article I came across an interesting project under development, Altmount. This would allow you to "mount" published content on Usenet and access it directly without downloading it... super interesting considering I can get multi-gigabit access to Usenet pretty easily.
There is also NzbDav for this too,
https://github.com/nzbdav-dev/nzbdav
The Windows built-in WebDAV in explorer embarrassingly slow. Pretty much unusable for anything serious.
For sure. I tried to setup a collaboration environment for a Customer years ago using WebDAV over SSL in lieu of Dropbox. Everything worked great (authenticating to Active Directory, NTFS ACLs, IP address restrictions in IIS policy where necessary, auditing access in Windows security log and IIS logs, no client to install), but the Windows client experience was hideously slow. People hated it for that and it got no traction.
OTOH gio-based WebDAV access built into Nautilus and Thunar is something I use daily, and it works quite fine, for a FUSE-based filesystem.
Unlike NFS or SMB, WebDAV mounts do not get stuck for a minute when the connection becomes unstable.
Kudos to Omni Group for supporting open-standard on-prem sync.
Copyparty has webdav and smb support (among others), which makes it a good candidate to combine with a Kodi client perhaps?
A lot of apps support WebDAV. It seems to be better supported than SFTP?
You can run a WebDAV server using caddy easily.
Relatedly, is there a good way to expose a directory of files via the S3 API? I could only find alpha quality things like rclone serve s3 and things like garage which have their own on disk format rather than regular files.
consider versitygw or s3proxy
Just like the author, I use WebDAV for Joplin, also Zotero. Just love them so much.
We need to keep using open protocols such as WebDAV instead of depending on proprietary APIs like the S3 API.
I wonder how much better WebDAV must have gotten with newer versions of the HTTP stack. I only used it briefly in HTTP mode but found the clients to all be rather slow, barely using tricks like pipelining to make requests go a little faster.
It's a shame the protocol never found much use in commercial services. There would be little need for official clients running in compatibity layers like you see with tools like Gqdrive and OneDrive on Linux. Frankly, except for the lack of standardised random writes, the protocol is still one of the better solutions in this space.
I have no idea how S3 managed to win as the "standard" API for so many file storage solutions. WebDAV has always been right there.
JMAP will eventually replace WebDAV.
No random writes is the nail in the coffin for me
> FTP is dead (yay),
Hahahaha, haha, ha, no. And probably (still)more used than WebDAV
pls send help
I'm using WebDAV to sync files from my phone to my NAS. There weren't any good alternatives, really. SMB is a non-starter on the public Internet (SMB-over-QUIC might change that eventually), SFTP is even crustier, rsync requires SSH to work.
What else?
Syncthing is pretty nice for that sort of thing.
I have just tried to run their unofficial apps, but I couldn't make them work.
Syncthing is great but it does file sync, not file sharing, so not ideal when you say want to share a big media library with your laptop but not necessarily load everything on it
That moves the goalpost. The user I was replying to wanted sync and didn't seem to be using other functionality like that.
This blog post didn't convince me. I must assume the default for most web devs in 2025 is hosting on a Linux VM and/or mounting the static files into a Docker container. SFTP is already there and Apache is too.
The last time I had to deal with WebDAV was for a crusty old CMS nobody liked using many years ago. The support on dev machines running Windows and Mac was a bit sketchy and would randomly have files skipped during bulk uploads. Linux support was a little better with davfs2, but then VSCode would sometimes refuse to recognize the mount without restarting.
None of that workflow made sense. It was hard to know what version of a file was uploaded and doing any manual file management just seemed silly. The project later moved to GitLab. A CI job now simply SFTPs files upon merge into the main branch. This is a much more familiar workflow to most web devs today and there's no weird jank.
>It's broadly available as you can see
And yet, I can never seem to find a decent java lib for webdav/caldav/carddav. Every time I look for one, I end up wanting to write my own instead. Then it just seems like the juice isn't worth the squeeze.