Another easy WebDAV test server

In the previous week I discovered another easy way to set up a WebDAV test server: Atlassian Confluence. This is a pretty neat wiki product that also exposes its contents via WebDAV. The Devoxx guys even used it to make their whole website.

To set up a new Confluence server you first have to download one of the fully functional 30-day trial editions here. After downloading you just unpack the file to reveal a standalone Tomcat server and then you'll need follow the installation instructions. In short this means:

• checking your Java installation: version and home directory
• setting a confluence.home value in /confluence/WEB-INF/classes/confluence-init.properties to a valid path somewhere on your disk
• make sure you don't have port conflicts
• start Confluence by starting the standalone Tomcat instance from the bin directory: ./catalina.sh start
• browse to http://localhost:8080
• follow the setup wizard you're presented with and remember the username and password you enter
  

After this you'll have a WebDAV server listening at http://localhost:8080/plugins/servlet/confluence/default. You'll have to authenticate using basic authentication with the credentials you entered in the setup wizard. By default there won't be much data available, but this can be easily solved by creating some spaces in Confluence and adding some pages to the spaces.