Some users set up services on Research Cloud that retrieve data from Research Drive or write to Research Drive.

In this case, it is desirable to make the access to Research Drive user-independent.

This can be achieved by using a "public" Research Drive link.


  1. The owner of the project folder on Research drive creates a public link following this tutorial.
  2. To implement the access, the public link itself and the password are required.
  3. Use a webdav-client of your service's programming environment. (For Python this may be webdavclient3)
  4. The required connection data map out as follows:
    1. "webdav_hostname": "https://researchdrive.surf.nl/public.php/webdav/" (the first part of the URL will vary if you are using your institute's Research Drive instance)
    2. "webdav_login": the last section of the public link's URL (it is a "random" string)
    3. "webdav_password": the password that belongs to the generated public link

Replace the token "remote.php" in the Research Drive instance URL with "public.php" and append "/webdav/" to the URL.

With these credentials your code will be able to use Research Drive according to the rights that are given to the public link.

Writing to "read-only" paths will fail silently

A part of your Research Drive access may be read-only. Also access through a public link. If you attempt to write to a read-only path, the action will fail silently. You will not be notified in any way, and the file will not be written/changed. Make sure that you know which paths on your Research Drive are read-only. If in doubt, just try to move a file, there. Then check if it is actually present, on Research Drive.



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