Installing neon (webdav) on Ubuntu Linux

This short tutorial shows you how to install neon on Ubuntu Linux Server. The process is very simple. For this tutorial, I'll be installing neon version 0.25.4. Linux kernel is 2.6.15-26-powerpc. I have used a Mac Mini (powerpc/ppc architecture). GCC version number is 4.0.3. Your configuration may be different from mine but the installation steps below should work fine for most configurations with little or no change at all (including other Linux distributions and even unixes e.g. MacOS X).

neon:

According to webdav.org,

"neon is an HTTP and WebDAV client library, with a C interface. Featuring:

  • High-level interface to HTTP and WebDAV methods (PUT, GET, HEAD etc)
  • Low-level interface to HTTP request handling, to allow implementing new methods easily.
  • persistent connections
  • RFC2617 basic and digest authentication (including auth-int, md5-sess)
  • Proxy support (including basic/digest authentication)
  • SSL/TLS support using OpenSSL (including client certificate support)
  • Generic WebDAV 207 XML response handling mechanism
  • XML parsing using the expat or libxml parsers
  • Easy generation of error messages from 207 error responses
  • WebDAV resource manipulation: MOVE, COPY, DELETE, MKCOL.
  • WebDAV metadata support: set and remove properties, query any set of properties (PROPPATCH/PROPFIND).
  • autoconf macros supplied for easily embedding neon directly inside an application source tree.

neon is free software, distributed under the GNU Library GPL."

Before starting, please check to see if there is a latest version available to download. Visit http://www.webdav.org/neon/ to find out about the available versions. IMPORTANT: See "Configuring Ubuntu Linux After Installation" to install the development tools required to compile and install neon from source code. Also, see Installing Libxml2 on Ubuntu Linux and Installing OpenSSL on Ubuntu Linux before installing neon.

Steps to download, compile, and install are as follows. Note: Replace 0.25.4 with your version number:

  • Downloading neon:

    Run the command below,

    wget http://www.webdav.org/neon/neon-0.25.4.tar.gz

  • Extracting files from the downloaded package:

    tar xvzf neon-0.25.4.tar.gz

    Now, enter the directory where the package is extracted.

    cd neon-0.25.4

  • Configuring neon Library:

    LIBS="-ldl" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/neon --with-ssl=openssl --with-libxml2 --with-libs=/usr/local/openssl/:/usr/local/libxml2/ --without-zlib

    Replace "/usr/local/neon" with the directory path where you want to copy neon's files and folders, "/usr/local/openssl/" with the path to OpenSSL and "/usr/local/libxml2/" with the path to libxml2. Note: check for any error message.
  • Compiling neon:

    make

    Note: check for any error message.

  • Installing neon:

    As root (for privileges on destination directory), run the following.

    With sudo,

    sudo make install

    Without sudo,

    make install

    Note: check for any error messages.

That’s it. Library has been successfully installed.

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