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Installing subversion on CentOS

Posted November 30th, 2008 in Applications and Linux/Unix/BSD

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 (read my "Add the RPMForge custom repository to CentOS" post about how to do this), 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]