Subversion (SVN) is a version control system. This post looks at how to install subversion on CentOS (the process is similar for other Linux distros) and the setting up a repository.
To install subversion on CentOS you need to have the RMForge custom repository enabled, and then issue the following command:
sudo yum install subversion
This will check for any dependencies and then prompt you to install those and subversion itself. Type in "y" and <enter> to install these.
Unfortunately it doesn’t set up anything else after installing the necessary files, so you need to add a subversion user and set up the repositories etc yourself. If we decide to call the subversion user "svn" then you add them like so:
sudo /usr/sbin/useradd svn sudo passwd svn
And then change to the subversion user like so:
su svn
Change to the svn user’s directory and then create a "repositories" directory like so:
cd mkdir repositories
And now create your project’s repository. For example, if we had a project called "myproject" you would do this:
cd repositories svnadmin create myproject
There will now be a "myproject" directory containing the following:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 svn svn 229 Nov 21 16:58 README.txt drwxrwxr-x 2 svn svn 1024 Nov 21 16:58 conf drwxrwsr-x 6 svn svn 1024 Nov 21 16:58 db -r--r--r-- 1 svn svn 2 Nov 21 16:58 format drwxrwxr-x 2 svn svn 1024 Nov 21 16:58 hooks drwxrwxr-x 2 svn svn 1024 Nov 21 16:58 locks
You need to edit "myproject/conf/svnserve.conf" and uncomment the following lines:
auth-access = write password-db = passwd
and edit the password file "myproject/conf/passwd" adding a new user and password. Note that the password is stored in plain text. In the following example we have a user called "john" whose password is "foobar123":
[users] john = foobar123
And finally, as the svn user, start the subversion daemon like so:
svnserve -d -r /home/svn/repositories
You can now connect to the subversion repository at e.g. svn://svn@hostname/myproject
You can add additional repositories under this user using the "svnadmin create" command and then access them at svn://[userame]@[hostname]/[project name]
