Davpoint - Davfs2 wrapper to mount SharePoint filesystems

Davpoint is a wrapper for the Davfs2 tool. It allows to mount remote SharePoint filesystems that require cookie-based authentication.

Rationale

Although SharePoint services are available through the standard WebDAV protocol, they may require the client to provide an authentication token in the HTTP header in addition to the standard username and password. The WebDAV client for Linux davfs2 does not directly support this mode of authentication, but it does allow to set any arbitrary cookie in its configuration file and its developer has suggested to “create some start script to automate” the retrieval of the authentication token.

Davpoint provides precisely such a script. Given a little extra configuration (see below), it will automatically authenticate a user to a SharePoint service, get the authentication token, then call davfs2 (through the standard mount (8) command) with the required configuration options to mount the SharePoint filesystem.

Configuration & Usage

Davpoint requires the WebDAV resource and its intended mount point to be listed in the /etc/fstab file. The username and password must also appear in Davfs2’s “secrets” file (either /etc/davfs2/secrets or ~/.davfs2/secrets), according to Davfs2’s documentation.

In addition, Davpoint needs a dedicated configuration file, which it expects in ~/.davfs2/sharepoint.conf by default. This file uses the .ini format, where each section represents a SharePoint resource.

Each section must contain at least two options: endpoint, which is the WebDAV resource to mount, and mountpoint, which is the location on the local filesystem where the resource should be mounted. The values must match what is configured in the /etc/fstab file. All other options will be passed verbatim to Davfs2.

Importantly, the main Davfs2 configuration file (/etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf or ~/.davfs2/davfs2.conf) is ignored when Davfs2 is called by Davpoint. Any Davfs2 options needed for a given SharePoint resource must be specified in the sharepoint.conf file instead of the davfs2.conf file.

Here is an example of a ~/.davfs2/sharepoint.conf file:

[example]
endpoint: https://example.com/personal/alice_example_com/Documents
mountpoint: /home/alice/example
use_locks: 0

With such a configuration, the resource may be mounted by the following command:

$ davpoint example

Unmounting the resource is done as usual with the standard umount (8) command.

Copying

Davpoint is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3 or higher. The full license is included in the COPYING file of the source distribution.