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> I should have titled this post "I hate S3".

Use it where it makes sense. And S3 does not necessarily equate to using Amazon. I like the Garage S3 project that is interesting for smaller scale uses and self-hosted systems. The project is funded with EU Horizon grants via NLnet.

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

I feel like WebDAV will have staying power for a simple reason: it’s easy to understand and implement. My company has a cloud platform for people to share files and I am working on a feature to allow it to work as a drive through WebDAV. We may support other protocols later on but WebDAV made the most sense to start off with because we already have all the infrastructure we need to deliver files over HTTP. The amount of additional complexity to support WebDAV was near-zero and the amount to support other protocols would be a lot more.

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

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

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

OmniFocus also supports WebDAV for folks that prefer to self-host - https://support.omnigroup.com/documentation/omnifocus/univer...

> 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

I feel the pain when you refeer to MinIO. I ended up using a pre 15 version in order to have all previous features but that sucks. I will try this.

A lot of apps support WebDAV. It seems to be better supported than SFTP?

You can run a WebDAV server using caddy easily.

> FTP is dead

Says who?

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.

Beautiful.

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.

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

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 wish 9p would be more generally available.

Both Windows and Mac have 9p support built in and both have locked away from the end user. Windows has it exclusively for communication with WSL. macOS has 9p but it's exclusively for communication with it's virtualization system. It would be amazing if I could just mount 9p from the UI.

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.

> 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 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.

FTP is not dead. A huge percent of Wind Turbines use FTP for data transfer.

No random writes is the nail in the coffin for me

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?

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.

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.

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.

> Lots of tools support it: [...| Windows Explorer (Map Network Drive, Connect to a Web site...)

Not sure he ever tried supporting that. We once did and it was a nightmare. People couldn't handle it at all even with screenshotted manuals.

My personal experience says that even the dumbest user is able to use FileZilla successfully, and therefore SFTP, while people just don't get the built-in WebDAV support of the OSes.

I also vaguely recall that WebDAV in Windows had quite a bit of randomly appearing problems and performance issues. But this was all a while ago, might have improved since then.

> FTP is dead (yay),

Hahahaha, haha, ha, no. And probably (still)more used than WebDAV

pls send help

It has been 16 years since I started this webdav client for Java:

https://github.com/lookfirst/sardine

Still going.

JMAP will eventually replace WebDAV.

>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.

"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-...

Copyparty has webdav and smb support (among others), which makes it a good candidate to combine with a Kodi client perhaps?

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)

The Windows built-in WebDAV in explorer embarrassingly slow. Pretty much unusable for anything serious.

if operating systems had just put a bit more time into the clients and not stopped any work in 2010 or so, webdav could have been much more, covering many usecases of fuse. unfortunately especially the mac webdav and finders outdated architecture make this just too painful

This seems like another article where they never define the acronym they use and expect everyone to have seen it already.

WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents directly in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for concurrency control and namespace operations, thus allowing the Web to be viewed as a writeable, collaborative medium and not just a read-only medium.[1] WebDAV is defined in RFC 4918 by a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebDAV