WebDAV with Box: still usable?
According to this official note https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043696414-WebDAV-with-Box Box does not support WebDAV but it is still usable and I have been doing so for years without any issues. A few days ago the service stopped working without changing anything at the client side and I would like to know if something has changed and WebDAV cannot be used any longer.
Just in case it may help to clarify why it is not working anymore: I get a 502 - Bad Gateway error when I try to determine the resource capabilities with an option request.
Thank you and best regards
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Official comment
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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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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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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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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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: 1803And we get a correct file listing:
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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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