HOWTO: Author PHP-Based Sites With WebDAV

I guess this one is a common problem, but it took me a while to figure out: If you use WebDAV to author your site (as I am doing on an internal box), PHP will process all GET requests for .php files, sending the resulting output to your editor.

One way around this is to configure an Alias for your web site with the right php_flag to switch the engine off. Here is a boilerplate configuration that does that and a couple more things I like when I’m doing development (like asking for a password):

Alias /davshare /var/www/html
<Location /davshare>
  php_flag engine off
  Dav On
  DAVMinTimeout 600
  DAVDepthInfinity On
  AllowOverride AuthConfig Indexes Limit FileInfo
  Options +Indexes
  IndexOptions FancyIndexing
  AuthType Basic
  Require valid-user
  AuthName "DAV Editing"
  AuthUserFile /var/www/etc/passwd
</Location>