This is a linux newbie here, so please be patient with me. I have installed Nginx onto an Archlinux virtual machine, and it works (perfectly well) as a reverse proxy to provide SSL and Auth to a farm of backend servers.

Now I would like to configure a location to serve WebDAV as well. I have understood that I would need to install https://github.com/arut/nginx-dav-ext-module.git. I cloned the git to my local machine, but now I am at loss. There is no archive that I could install via pacman. The module contains a C script, a "config" file, and a readme. The readme advises to issue this command ./configure --with-http_dav_module --add-module=/path/to/the/above/module but that produces the error /usr/local/bin/bash: No such file or directory.

I am sure that i am doing something extremely stupid, but the fact is, I am totally stuck. Is anybody prepared to walk me through the installation?

Hmmm ... bash in usually /bin/bash, not /usr/local/bin/bash. Me thinks there's something a bit funny with that build script, or it was written for a different platform. Also, C source files are generally not referred to as "scripts", since that would cause confusion with C shell scripts as well as being incorrect - C is a compiled language, which is what the configure file is trying to set up for you (probably so you can run "make" next, which actually does the compilation).

Anyhow, have you tried using the nginx-webdav package from the AUR? I run Arch myself, but I haven't built too many packages from the AUR, so I can't comment much on the quality. There's a section in the Arch wiki describing how to build AUR packages.

BTW, is there some particular reason you need Nginx? Apache has had pretty mature WebDAV support for quite a long time, and it might be a bit easier to get going. I know that Nginx is the new shiny, but I'm curious if there's a requirement for it in your scenario (honest question - I'm not saying at all that it's the wrong choice for you).

Thank you for your response, which is very useful. I am progressing bug I am not quite there yet. As for Nginx, my most important requirement was for a server that could do reverse-proxy. After reading a lot about both Apache and Nginx (and also IIS under windows), I came to the conclusion that Nginx might be the simplest. Indeed, rewriting headers is incredibly convoluted in IIS, a bit less so in Apache, and no-pain-at-all in Nginx. If I hadn't had the reverse-proxy issue, I would have gone for Apache, and indeed most of my back-end machines serve via Apache.

Ah - that amkes sense then. I've never played around with mod_proxy in Apache, but it might be able to do the job. I'm not sure about using something like mod_rewrite + mod_proxy to re-write headers and then proxy the request. The servers I host tend to be small and low traffic, so I've not needed to deal with things like that :-).