Android + webdav

Written by vidarlo on 20101128 in english and Linux and software and tutorials with no comments.

Being a geek, the opportunity to upload pictures straight from my cell phone (Android) to the web is a nice feature. I could of course use Dropbox or a similar solution, but that is boring, and I don’t get to decide the URL…

So welcome WebDAV.

Finding a good webdav client for Android took me most of the time. I eventually settled for Cloud Browser (€.99), which was the first one to work as expected, and the only one I found which integrated neatly on the ‘Share’ menu of the gallery, making upload easy. There are several free apps as well, but the ones I tried did not integrate / behave the way I want.

The only drawback is that Cloud Browser uses Basic authentication, and not Digest. If you’re using public WLAN’s it might be a very good idea to use https to access your webdav repository like me.

For the Apache part of things I added a WebDAV configuration, more or less as detailed in the apache mod_dav documentation.

<Directory /home/vidarlo/websites/bitsex.net/dav>
 RewriteEngine off
 AllowOverride All
 Options FollowSymLinks +Indexes
 Order Deny,Allow
 Allow from All;
 Dav On
 AuthType Basic
 AuthName "WebDav"
 AuthDigestDomain /dav
 AuthDigestProvider file
 AuthUserFile /home/vidarlo/htpasswd
 require valid-user
 <Limit PUT POST DELETE PROPFIND PROPPATCH MKCOL COPY MOVE GET HEAD>
 require valid-user
 </Limit>
</Directory>

This simply worked. I can upload pictures once I snap them, and I can sync files the other way too. Better than the dropbox for android, and I have control over my data… 🙂

Highly recommended system 🙂 If you’re lazy, you can always use the app mentioned with Amazon S3…

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