WebDAV with Box: still usable?

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14 comments

  • Official comment
    jbesan

    Hi,

    I am the Product Manager for Box Uploads & Downloads and would like to give some clarity about WebDav support at Box.

    As some of you noticed, this sync method has been out-of-support for close to 3 years now and we strongly advise users and customers to not use WebDav for new applications and use-cases but use our regular APIs instead: we maintain very basic support of WebDav (mostly security-wise) and will likely end-of-life WebDav next year. If you have existing applications that leverage WebDav it would be a good idea to start planning for a migration to our REST APIs.

    While I imagine this could be disappointing news, I hope this helps you all  the right development decisions.

    Jacques

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  • Alex Novotny

    Hi, 

    I'm not sure. I asked an internal person to confirm. I'll report back when I hear from them. 

    Alex, Box Developer Advocate

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  • Paul Dann

    I'm seeing the same issue. If WebDAV is gone, I'll have to stop using Box altogether. WebDAV is standard and cross-platform. Box don't do a client for Linux, which I need to use for work. 🤷

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  • Stefano Gervasini

    Hi, i have same problem too, we should know if WEBDAV still usable, please can you have an answer?

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  • Cynap testing

    is there any news on this issue? It looks like there are a few people with the same problem and I guess there might be many other who did not report anything.

    I do not need full WebDAV support (would be nice to have though), but an official note confirming that WebDAV access is broken and maybe some workarounds would be nice.

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  • Stefano Gervasini

    This Solution is not a news, there are the "we maintain very basic support of WebDav", the webdav now do not work at all... we are happy if the basic function still work.. we do not need anything else...

    https://dav.box.com/dav   don't work at all..

    this is the return state

    <d:error>
    <s:exception>Sabre_DAV_Exception_NotImplemented</s:exception>
    <s:message>GET is only implemented on File objects</s:message>
    </d:error>

    thanks

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  • pnystrom

    I am also encountering this error.  I have been a long-time user on Linux and appreciate Box's fine-grained sharing controls.  But if WebDAV is no longer working and not expected to be fixed, and if there won't be a Linux client that allows me to treat my folders as an extension of my local filesystem, I will have to look elsewhere.  Very disappointing.

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  • Wolfgang

    I can confirm the issue. hints to usable alternatives are very welcome!

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  • Evidlo

    If WebDAV support is removed, our research group will no longer be able to mount our Box share on our workstation's filesystem.  The Box CLI is really not a satisfactory replacement for this purpose.

    With that said, I did some investigation with curl to send a simple WebDAV request to list files in the root directory:

    curl -s -D /tmp/boxhead -X PROPFIND --user 'evanw3:@illinois.edu:password' 'https://dav.box.com/dav' > /tmp/box

    The header response looks like:

    HTTP/2 502 
    server: nginx
    date: Fri, 07 Oct 2022 05:52:34 GMT
    content-type: text/html
    content-length: 60707
    etag: "5ddb8f87-ed23"
    via: 1.1 google
    alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=2592000,h3-29=":443"; v="46,43"

    And the reponse HTML shows this page:

    So Sabre DAV failing somehow but nginx is just feeding us a generic 502 error.  Probably need to actually look at the logs.

     

    Compare that against a similar request to the ownCloud demo website:

    curl -s -D /tmp/owncloudhead -X PROPFIND --user 'demo:demo' 'https://demo.owncloud.org/remote.php/webdav' > /tmp/owncloud

    Header:

    HTTP/2 207 
    cache-control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
    content-security-policy: default-src 'none';
    content-type: application/xml; charset=utf-8
    date: Fri, 07 Oct 2022 05:52:56 GMT
    dav: 1, 3, extended-mkcol, 2
    expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
    pragma: no-cache
    referrer-policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
    server: Apache
    strict-transport-security: max-age=315360000; preload
    vary: Brief,Prefer
    x-content-type-options: nosniff
    x-download-options: noopen
    x-frame-options: SAMEORIGIN
    x-permitted-cross-domain-policies: none
    x-robots-tag: none
    x-xss-protection: 0
    content-length: 1803

    And we get a correct file listing:

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  • Evidlo

    Also, the message posted by Stefano Gervasini is a bit of a red herring.  Browsing to https://dav.box.com/dav in Firefox produces that error because it tries to use the GET method on a directory.  It's not really indicative of a problem with Sabre DAV.

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  • nurio nurio

    For what it's worth: I have the same problem since the second of august. WebDAV is not working at all and either the post should be changed in that WebDAV has been shut down or the service should be fixed. For me this makes box.com unusable.

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  • H D

    We too will have to stop using box as it will fully not be supporting mounting on linux now.

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  • GJ

    I agree with the former posts. 
    Do you know of any way to retrieve the files we used to access through WebDAV ? When I connect to Box, I only see .prop and .zip files which are not the original format.

    How can I migrate this data if I can't access it ?

    Thank you for your help !

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  • Lubos Hozzan

    Actually spotted a issue with accessing via WebDAV and to be honest, I am very sad.

    OK, maybe it is a time to looking for new cloud service, with WebDAV support. Managing huge archive via web GUI is nightmare.

    Regards ...

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