How to enable WebDAV in Adobe AEM?

Question

I am trying to access Adobe AEM via WebDAV, however, I cannot get it to work.

I am running the out-of-the-box crx-quickstart, so I am using port 4502 and the default workspace. I am using Windows Explorer as the WebDAV client, which I use to connect to Sharepoint without difficulty.

These seem to be the only instructions for connecting to AEM via WebDAV. http://dev.day.com/docs/en/crx/current/how_to/webdav_access.html

The instructions imply that you just point your WebDAV client at the following URL and you are golden. However, I cannot seem to get it to work.

http://localhost:4502/crx/repository/crx.default

Since this doesn't work, I have verified other settings.

For instance, within the OSGi configuration manager http://localhost:4502/system/console/configMgr I verified and clicked Save on various WebDAV settings.

Apache Sling Simple WebDAV Servlet
Root Path = "/crx/repository"

Apache Sling DavEx Servlet
Root Path = "/crx/server"
Use absolute URIs [X]

I also tried to work backwards from these instructions on how to disable WebDAV http://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kb/DisableWebDAV.html

However, right away, it refers to <cq5_home>/crx-quickstart/server/ and there is no server directory under the crx-quickstart directory. Should I create this directory?

I also investigated this document on setting up Virtual Repositories. http://dev.day.com/docs/en/cq/current/core/administering/virtual_repository.html

However, I was still not able to get it to work and in fact, I couldn't get RMI working either (separate question, I guess).

Answer 1

I'm not sure about the /crx/repository path but WebDAV is also enabled on /, as demonstrated below on a vanilla AEM 5.6.1 instance. curl -T does a WebDAV PUT.

$ date > /tmp/somefile.txt
$ curl -u admin:admin -X MKCOL http://localhost:4502/tmp/test
$ curl -u admin:admin -T/tmp/somefile.txt http://localhost:4502/tmp/test/somefile.txt
$  curl -u admin:admin http://localhost:4502/tmp/test/somefile.txt
Fri Jan 17 10:41:36 CET 2014 

RMI would indeed be a separate question, and if you're hesitating between WebDAV and RMI you might want to expose your use case, as the Sling HTTP APIs might be good enough.

Answer 2

To get this to work from Windows Explorer you need to add a CRX user with the same user name and password as a Windows user that has permission to access the repository files. The Windows WebClient will ask you to logon at a Windows level. This userid must also exist in both Windows and CRX. Once I did this I was able to set up a shared drive to point to the CRX repository.

I also made a registry change to set the WebClient to use Basic authentication for SSL and non-SSL shares. Using the registry editor, for the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters
set
BasicAuthLevel to 2.