RailsDAV now up for Rails 2.0.2

February 23rd, 2008

Hi all,

The RailsDAV plugin for integrating WebDAV controllers into your Rails application is now compatible with Rails 2.0.2. I’m doing a complete re-write to make RailsDAV easier to use and work with merb as well, but it’s slow going.

You can install RailsDAV with


ruby script/plugin install http://svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/railsdav

WebDAV plugin for Mephisto

May 5th, 2007

I’ve put together a WebDAV plugin for mephisto the rails blogging engine which runs this site which adds 2 webdav controllers using RailsDAV.

1. Theme DAV Controller – Allows a standard file mount of the mephisto themes directory protected by a BASIC authentication requiring you to log in as an admin user. This means you can edit the life themes from your favourite editor. All general file functions such as move, copy, delete and make folder should all be good.

2. Asset DAV Controller – Allows uploading and downloading of Mephisto assets through the file system mounting. This is a great example of using RailsDAV with attachment_fu which i’ll go into greater detail about in a later post. It’s worth noting that if you upload images, the resized versions thumb and tiny are also then available for download. You can’t create new directories but you can delete assets.

For now installing the mephisto_dav plugin has the following pre-reqs:

So installation is a matter of running the following in your mephisto rails directory:


ruby script/plugin install http://svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/railsdav
ruby script/plugin install http://svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/mephisto_dav

Then after starting your server you can connect your favourite WebDAV client (such as Finder on Mac OS X) to http://server/theme_dav or http://server/asset_dav

UPDATE: I realise that the comments havn’t been working on liverail and the railsdav lighthouse project was shut. Both should be working now.

4 comments »

RailsDAV Issue tracking on Lighthouse

April 20th, 2007

While I was away I noticed the release of the Lighthouse application for issue tracking by ActiveReload and thought this will be a great way to do my issue tracking on a few projects. I was going to setup a Trac instance for it but this may be an alternative which saves some time and effort on my part.

So there is now a public Lighthouse project for RailsDAV which I invite anyone using it to submit tickets for me with any problems they may be having, bugs, or feature requests.

I’ve also added a Paypal donate button because some nice chap said he would love to able to donate a little to keep this project alive which is awful kind of him. So if anyone wants to donate some money to RailsDAV and any other projects appearing on liverail.net go right ahead.

Thanks Stuart

0 comments »

RailsDAV update, dynamic base_dir

January 13th, 2007

I’ve added a couple of features to the RailsDAV act_as_filewebdav. Dynamic base directories and absolute base directories.

act_as_filewebdav takes two parameters:

base_dir can take either a String for the base directory or a Symbol which will use a method in the controller to return the base directory to use on each request.

absolute allows for either true or false (defaults to false) to determine to use either an absolute filesystem directory or relative to the RAILS_ROOT

So a common example usecase to allow users to upload/download to their own directories after they have logged on using basic HTTP authentication.


class FileDavController < ApplicationController
  act_as_filewebdav :base_dir => :user_web_dir, :absolute => true
  before_filter :user_auth

  def user_auth
    basic_auth_required {|username, password| session[:user] = User.authenticate(username,password) }
  end

  def user_web_dir
    "/var/user/#{session[:user].username}" 
  end

end
11 comments »

New WebDAV Ruby On Rails Plugin Release

January 6th, 2007

I’ve finally had some time over the holidays to put together a new release of the RailsDAV plugin for WebDAV functionality in Rails.

It’s still really a 0.0.2 release as bugs are to be fixed and still havn’t nailed a structure for the plugin i’m happy with. But for now I have improved the structure and implemented some fixes courtesy of Albert Ramstedt. Thanks Albert.

As such the use of RailsDAV plugin has changed a bit and it won’t be backwards compatible so scan the code if you are using it.

The act_as_railsdav method is attached to ActionController and can be used by calling act_as_railsdav on a controller


 class MyDavController < ActionController::Base
    act_as_railsdav
The controller must then have a route of 

map.connect 'mydav/*path_info', :controller => 'my_dav', :action => 'webdav'

It is then necessary to implement some or all of the following methods:

get_resource_for_path needs to return a WebDAVResource object such as FileWebDavResource

To add webdav authentication to your controller just use


class MyDavController < ActionController::Base
   act_as_railsdav
   before_filter :my_auth

   def my_auth()
       basic_auth_required |username, password| do
          session[:user] = User.your_authentication(username,password)
       end
   end

Additionally you can add a simple filesystem expose to a controller by:


 class FileDavController < ActionController::Base
    act_as_filewebdav :base_dir => 'public'
 end
The new version of the plugin can be donwloaded using 
svn co http://svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/railsdav
It also requires the following gems

I’m going to spend a lot more time on RailsDAV now so let me know what you want out of it!

14 comments »

WebDAV Ruby On Rails Plugin

June 25th, 2006

The moment a few of you have been waiting for.

I’m releasing the first version of the RailsDAV plugin. What does RailsDAV do. Well it allows people to create Ruby On Rails controllers which will respond to WebDAV requests and expose functionality as a file-system.

The plugin can be downloaded from

http://svn.liverail.net/svn/plugins/railsdav

Of course the great thing about WebDAV is that it doesn’t just need to expose a directory on your server but can expose any concept you have in your application. For instance, for a Digital Asset Management System expose a list of tags as directory names, navigate into that directory and see all the images tagged with that word.

I’ll write about using the plugin in just a second, but first a little wording. This is definitely a 0.1 release and still needs work and a lot of testing before being production ready. It is likely to take on a different shape as well. It has many problems under WebBrick but works very very nicely under Mongrel (this is a problem with WebBrick) But release early, release often huh!

The plugin contains a base WebDAV controller and 2 specific implementations. A file-system exposer and an ActiveRecord exposer.

With thanks to Fabien Franzen for his input so far

There is also video of the FileSystem WebDAV Controller and the ActiveRecord WebDAV Controller

Read the rest of this entry

WebDAV on Rails

May 8th, 2006 A little treat for you all. As part of a larger project i've been working on, i've created a plugin for Rails which allows for controllers to handle "WebDAV":http://www.webdav.org/ requests. At the moment it is only working for Rails 1.0 but i'll work on upgrading it. It's still only beta, has a few problems and doesn't do the whole spec, which is massive. But it's a good start. WebDav controllers can be registered by: 


  class DavController < WebDavController
    set_rails_webdav_root "directory_path"
    set_max_propfind_depth 1

  end
This will allow a directory under RAILS_ROOT to be accessible via WebDAV. You can also register callbacks to handle the assets after a request 

  def after_webdav_put
     logger.info("got a new file #{@file_path}")
  end
WebDAV is great and a Rails implementation will allow exposing not just files but a file-system representation of your data and system to users. Anyway i'll release the code soon but for now "here is a video":/assets/2007/2/4/WebDavOnRails.mov