Specifications

Chapter 3 Creating and Managing Websites 53
Browsers are not generally WebDAV-enabled, but a browser can access a
WebDAV-enabled site and perform read operations (limited by realm permissions
congured on the web server), because WebDAV is a superset of HTTP.
Write operations cannot be performed by a web browser. They require a WebDAV client,
such as Goliath, or the client built into the Mac OS X le system and typically used
through the Finder. For more information about Goliath, see www.webdav.org/goliath.
Step 1: Turn on WebDAV for the site in Server Admin.
See “Enabling WebDAV on Websites” on page 52.
Step 2: Set up realms for the site in Server Admin to control access to the site.
See “Using Realms to Control Access” on page 39. For example, you could create a
folder for shared documents inside the website folder and give specic people Browse
and Read/Write access to that folder.
Step 3: Tell authorized users how to connect to the site using the WebDAV client
built into Mac OS X (or Mac OS X Server).
To use Finder to connect to a website using WebDAV:
1 Open Finder.
2 Choose Go > Connect to Server.
3 In the Server Address eld, enter the HTTP URL.
The URL for connecting is http://<serverURL>:<server port>/<folder, or folder where
collaborative les are stored>.
4 Click Connect.
Note: To connect from another platform, see the platform-specic documentation for
the relevant WebDAV client. Microsoft platforms use an authentication mechanism that
can make it dicult or impossible to mount WebDAV volumes from Mac OS X.
Conguring Web Content File and Folder Permissions
You can use le and folder permissions to control WebDAV access to website content
that is located by default in the /Library/WebServer/Documents/ folder.
Mac OS X Server imposes the following constraints on web content les and folders:
For security reasons, web content les and folders must not be writable by Everyone. Â
Web content les and folders are owned by user Root and Group Admin by default, Â
so they are modiable by an administrator but not by user or group www.
To use WebDAV, web content les must be readable and writable by user or group Â
www, and folders must be readable, writable, and executable by user or group www.