CQ5 WebDAV Support for Windows 7 64-bit

After a long break from working in the content management space, I returned to my CMS roots with a focus on CQ5. As a novice CQ5 developer, I've been chipping away at CQ5 recipes such as: As a developer, I would to like to access the CRX via WebDAV on my Windows 7 workstation. Simple question, right? Wrong. As it turns out Windows 7 64-bit does not support mapping a WebDAV resource easily. Sure, there were claims that applying KB907306 would do the trick. This didn't work. There were instructions on mucking with the registry. Really, this isn't the 90s. No thank you. Oh, wait...there are third-party freeware packages such as BitKinex. Again, no thank you. Lastly, there were some articles around changing the authentication scheme from Basic Authentication to Digest Authentication. Why can't I have native support! 

Enough with the rant. I recently had a good experience building a command line WebDAV client under Linux (CentOS) called cadaver. As a command line guy, I already had Cygwin running under Windows 7. Sure enough, Cygwin supports cadaver under All > Web

For those of you running Windows 7, need WebDAV support and don't mind using the command line, try cadaver out. Once installed, connecting to the CRX is pretty painless.

  1. Launch Cygwin
  2. Create a file called ~/.netrc and include the following lines. This will allow you to interact with the CRX without being promoted for a username and password.
    machine localhost
    login admin
    password admin
    
  3. Run cadaver.
    $ cadaver http://localhost:4502/crx/repository/crx.default
    
  4. You should now receive a shell to interact with the CRX. Most of the commands are similar to a command line FTP client (ls, cd, get, etc.). Simply type help for a list of available commands.