[LON-CAPA-admin] Enabling WebDAV

[Raeburn, Stuart]

Rex,

On your LON-CAPA server you might check ownership/permissions for the directory where webDAV session files will be stored by LON-CAPA.  This directory will have been created when ./UPDATE was used to install or update to loncaapa-2.11.6. 

The following command will tell you where LON-CAPA will store session files (assuming this is an Ubuntu server):

sudo less /etc/apache2/loncapa_apache.conf | grep lonDAVsessDir

In the request in your webdav client I would add a trailing forward slash to the Folder, i.e., make that webdav/tccfl/abertr/. Although the web server will likely append one if you didn't include one, your web server logs will include fewer entries if you include one.

Assuming this is an Ubuntu server I would look in the access logs in /var/log/apache2/
I would expect there to be a couple of entries similar to:

<Your IP> - - [Date Time] "OPTIONS /webdav/tccfl/abertr/ HTTP/1.1" 401 878 "-" "WebDAVLib/1.3"
<Your IP>. - - [Date Time] "OPTIONS /webdav/tccfl/abertr/ HTTP/1.1" 401 878 "-" "WebDAVLib/1.3"

If authentication succeeded you would next see something similar to

<Your IP>- abertr [Date Time] "OPTIONS /webdav/tccfl/abertr/ HTTP/1.1" 200 591 "-" "WebDAVLib/1.3"

and I expect you would find a session file in the webDAV session directory.
If such a file exists, then from the command line you can use a command similar to the following to see what it contains:

sudo /home/httpd/perl/debug/dump_db.pl /home/httpd/webdav/sessionIDs/*.id 

If authentication failed you would see something similar to:

<Your IP> - - [Date Time] "OPTIONS /webdav/tccfl/abertr/  HTTP/1.1" 403 577 "-" "WebDAVLib/1.3"

With a standard LON-CAPA session active in your web browser, and the Domain Coordinator role active you might use:

Main Menu >"Create users or modify the roles and privileges of users" > "Add/Modify a User" to check the User Tools settings for username: abertr in the tccfl domain.
specifically the "WebDAV access to Authoring Spaces (if SSL and author/co-author)" entry.

As Domain Coordinator you could also use:

Main Menu > Status of domain servers > User Environment for current log-in
and check that either environment.availabletools.webdav is set to 1, or if you set a user-specific value for yourself, that environment.tools.webdav is set to 1.

The next step would be to start adding:

print STDERR "Add some meaningful debug message\n";

lines to /home/httpd/lib/perl/Apache/lonwebdavauth.pm and then reload the web server:  

sudo systemctl reload apache2

before trying to connect to webDAV, and then look in /var/log/apache2/error_log for debug output.

Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium
________________________________________
From: LON-CAPA-admin <lon-capa-admin-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org> on behalf of Rex Abert via LON-CAPA-admin <lon-capa-admin at mail.lon-capa.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2025 9:33 AM
To: LON-CAPA-admin at mail.lon-capa.org
Cc: Kyle Dragovich
Subject: [LON-CAPA-admin] Enabling WebDAV

I would like to get WebDAV enabled for LC here at TSC.  When I try to connect, I receive a message "Not a WebDAV enabled share."

I checked with our IT department to confirm that the dav and dav_fs modules are running and enabled on Apache—they confirmed that they are.

In the domain configuration, I have the boxes checked for "Personal Web Page," "Blog," "WebDAV," and "Portfolio."

We use internal authentication.

I don't know if image attachments are allowed, but I'll try.

Any suggestions to help get this going?


Rex Abert

Professor of Mathematics

Science and Mathematics