nwedav

A high-performance WebDAV server implementation in pure C.

Features

• WebDAV Class 2 compliance (RFC 4918)
• HTTP/1.1 with keep-alive support
• Basic and Digest authentication
• Resource locking (exclusive and shared)
• Property management (dead properties)
• User quota management
• Cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows)
• Event-driven I/O (epoll, kqueue, poll, select)
• Thread pool for request processing
• Connection pooling
• SQLite-based metadata storage

Requirements

Build Dependencies

• GCC or Clang (C11 support)
• Make or CMake
• SQLite3 development libraries
• OpenSSL development libraries
• UUID library (Linux)

Debian/Ubuntu

apt-get install build-essential libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev uuid-dev

RHEL/CentOS/Fedora

dnf install gcc make sqlite-devel openssl-devel libuuid-devel

macOS

brew install sqlite openssl

Building

Using Make

make

Using CMake

mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Build Output

• nwedav - WebDAV server binary
• webdavctl - Administration CLI tool

Installation

make install

Default installation prefix is /usr/local. Override with PREFIX:

make install PREFIX=/opt/nwedav

Configuration

Initialize Database

./webdavctl init -d /var/lib/nwedav

Add User

./webdavctl user add <username> -d /var/lib/nwedav

Set User Quota

./webdavctl quota set <username> <bytes> -d /var/lib/nwedav

Start Server

./nwedav -d /var/lib/nwedav -p 8080

Command Line Options

nwedav

Option	Description
-c, --config <path>	Configuration file path
-p, --port <port>	Listen port (default: 8080)
-b, --bind <addr>	Bind address (default: 0.0.0.0)
-d, --data <path>	Data directory path
-f, --foreground	Run in foreground
-v, --verbose	Enable debug logging
-V, --version	Show version
-h, --help	Show help

webdavctl

webdavctl init [-d <data_dir>]
webdavctl user add <username> [-d <data_dir>]
webdavctl user delete <username> [-d <data_dir>]
webdavctl user list [-d <data_dir>]
webdavctl quota set <username> <bytes> [-d <data_dir>]
webdavctl quota get <username> [-d <data_dir>]

Configuration File

Copy nwedav.conf.sample to nwedav.conf and modify as needed:

[server]
port = 8080
bind_address = 0.0.0.0
worker_threads = 4
max_connections = 1000

[storage]
root_path = /var/lib/nwedav/files
database_path = /var/lib/nwedav/nwedav.db

[auth]
method = basic
realm = nwedav

[logging]
level = info
file = /var/log/nwedav/access.log

WebDAV Client Access

Linux (cadaver)

cadaver http://localhost:8080/

Windows

Map network drive to \\localhost@8080\DavWWWRoot

macOS

Finder > Go > Connect to Server > http://localhost:8080/

Architecture

src/
├── core/          # Server core, configuration, logging
├── http/          # HTTP parser and response builder
├── webdav/        # WebDAV method handlers
├── storage/       # File system backend, properties, locks
├── auth/          # Authentication (Basic, Digest)
├── user/          # User management
├── concurrency/   # Thread pool, event loop, connection pool
├── platform/      # Platform abstraction layer
└── cli/           # webdavctl tool

Supported Methods

Method	Description
OPTIONS	Server capabilities
GET	Retrieve resource
HEAD	Retrieve resource metadata
PUT	Create/update resource
DELETE	Delete resource
MKCOL	Create collection
COPY	Copy resource
MOVE	Move resource
PROPFIND	Retrieve properties
PROPPATCH	Modify properties
LOCK	Lock resource
UNLOCK	Unlock resource

Performance

• Event-driven I/O with epoll (Linux), kqueue (BSD/macOS)
• Thread pool for parallel request processing
• Connection pooling with keep-alive support
• Zero-copy response building where possible
• Memory pool for frequent allocations

Security

• Path traversal protection
• PBKDF2-SHA256 password hashing
• Digest authentication with nonce validation
• Resource locking with owner verification
• User-based access control

License

MIT License