Installing SVN on Debian

In order to build an XP environment, I will start with Control Version System. I choose Subversion CVS because have sufficient maturity, good integration with Eclipse via Subclipse, and I have experience using it at my job.

Following the principle “don’t repeat your self” and others good works, we have many articles in google installing SVN on Debian, like this great post by pasyonic. But I will do my own personal cheatsheet.

Installing tools:

apt-get install subversion libapache2-svn

Creating a folder for your repos:

mkdir /var/repos

Permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/repos

Configuring WebDav-SVN for Apache /etc/apache2/mods-available/dav_svn.conf:

<location>
  DAV svn
  SVNParentPath /var/repos
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "Subversion Repository"
  AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd
  Require valid-user
</location>

We must insert user/passwd(md5 encrypted) for each user you want to have RW access to all your repos:

htpasswd -cmb /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd juanan

Restart Apache to reload the changes.
We can create a repo with:

 svnadmin create /var/repos/myproject

Important¡¡ reload permisions for apache user:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/repos/myproject
mkdir /var/repos/myproject/branches
mkdir /var/repos/myproject/tags
mkdir /var/repos/myproject/trunk

I recommend to use the classic tree branches/tags/trunk for your repos. Every software take your releases from this folder tree, and it is a good convention for developments.

Then you can access to your repo from the URL http://www.yourdomain.com/repos/myproject. You can checkout, commit,… with juanan user.

If you want administering the users for each project, what permissions have, you must add this line to /etc/apache2/mods-available/dav_svn.conf:

AuthzSVNAccessFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.authz

Creating that file with contents like these:

[myproject:/]
@admin = rw
[groups]
admin = juanan

Tortoise is great SVN client for Windows, it integrates perfectly with file explorer.

Subclipse a great option for Eclipse IDE.

The Subversion Book, if you want to learn all about SVN.