Comments on Setting up Subversion and websvn on Debian

I've tried at least 4 or 5 other subversion installation documents with little to no success. Most of the time Apache would never configure properly. Props to you! Finally an installation document that works and makes sense.

Subversion is great! I used SVNManager for managing my Subversion repo.

When you say: 

svn import -m "testing over https" https://example.com/svn_wombat ~/TEMP/

I think you mean: 

svn import -m "testing over https" ~/TEMP/ https://example.com/svn_wombat

ie swap the last two arguments. 

Good !

I like how to forge ! Great resource !

Agreed. This is one of the mistake I found as well in this tutorial.
I wonder how all other users said; "Great, worked perfectly for me!".
Unfortunately it does not work for me and I suspect some more errors and missing information in this tutorial. Thanks anyway. I remains one of the best tutorial I found on the web.

Hello, I make a spanish translation of this great howto, is in http://www.pastelero.net/2006/09/12/instalando-subversion-y-websvn-en-debian/, if you have any problem with this, please contact me.

Bye. 

Fantastic Article! 

But can I suggest instead of:

    usermod -Gsubversion john

everyone use something like: 

    addgroup john subversion

"usermod -G" sometimes wipes all the user's existing groups.  

Just a hint..

My preferably way to do that is using gpasswd:

 # gpasswd -a userX groupY
 Adding user userX to group groupY

usermod -Gsubversion john REMOVED ME FROM SUDOERS FILE ON UBUNTU

There are some differences between Debian and Ubuntu, I clearly mentioned not to just copy/paste that code. Commands may behave differently on different distributions.

If you lost your admin privileges on Ubuntu and don't know the root password, try putting yourself back in the admin group using a Knoppix CD.

As other comments mention the addgroup command is a safe alternative, I changed the snippet in the howto to this command.

Debian Sarge uses SVN 1.1 which has the BDB filesystem as the default for new repositories. However, since SVN 1.2 the FSFS filesystem has become the new default. So, to be as futureproof as possible , I suggest that You change the repository creation commands as follows:

# svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /var/svn-repos/project_zen

# svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /var/svn-repos/project_wombat

hai all

i think the line below in the 

Setting up Subversion and websvn on Debian tutorial is wrong

$ svn co svn+ssh://example.com/usr/share/svn-repos/project_zen/trunk testcheckout

its like

$ svn co svn+ssh://example.com/var/svn-repos/project_zen/trunk testcheckout

correct me if its wrong 

thanks 

Thanks pointing that out, it has been corrected :)

thanks for sharing.

Hello all!

Great article! I just wanted to add a reference to another howto article on creating SSH keys for Windows machines that will be loggin into the https repository:

https://www.howtoforge.com/ssh_key_based_logins_putty

I found this when looking for myself, and thought I would post it here to give others easier access.

Thanks again for the article!

thank you

wont the ssh users be able to see server / ???

Thanks for the great how-to. I managed to get all fixed. However, there is one minor mistake (of course, everybody will be able to fix it themselves)

/etc/init.s/apache2 restart
should be:
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

gr. P

Thanks

You should add .bashrc file with content :

umask 002

On top of the /var/svn-repos

When I did: $ ssh-agent $ ssh-add $ ssh faizan@localhost ssh: connect to host localhost port 22: Connection refused Similarly, later in the tutorial: $ svn import -m "importing test over ssh+svn" ~/TEMP/ svn+ssh://127.0.0.1/var/svn/icilpk/ trunk svn: Network connection closed unexpectedly Please Note- I had skipped: $ cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh [email protected] "cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys" because when I ran "ssh-add" it already asked me for a password and all :s was that the right thing to do?

ok, so i need to make amends to that last post. I'll start over:

faizan@acer-laptop:~/.ssh$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/faizan/.ssh/id_dsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/faizan/.ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/faizan/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.

faizan@acer-laptop:~/.ssh$ ls
id_dsa id_dsa.pub

faizan@acer-laptop:~/.ssh$ cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh faizan@acer-laptop "cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
ssh: connect to host acer-laptop port 22: Connection refused

I pressed enter when it asked me about the file name to save to, and when it asked me for a password.

So why am i getting the error above? :s please help!

Adding the apache user to the subversion group fixes this but as the author said (almost at the top):

The apache user won't be put in the group because I find it less secure. 

I did this with addgroup:

# addgroup www-data subversion

This worked for me and I don't worry about the risks since my server is located in a very secure network. But can anyone elaborate the risks with this I'm grateful.

But I will probably remove it again since my clients only will communicate to the svn-server via https.

Everything works grate but when I use svn+ssh to checkin new stuff the owner of db/current and db/txn-current changes from APACHE_USER to CHECKING_IN_USER.

When I browse websvn the repository is empty until I change the owner back to APACHE_USER.

Have I missed something?

One way to solve this problem is using a cronjob that changes permissions at a regular basis. But is there an other one?

Thank you. Never done any of that before and your instructions were perfect. Great article

Thanks for sharing. You can also refer this site to get some more useful details.

Used this howto to get websvn going on ubuntu 8.04 server. Thanks!

However, I needed one additional package to get it running:

# apt-get install  python-subversion

Also, enscript does not prompt me for anything.

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/index.html which is the definitive
answer.  It appears that the options order has changed and so was able
to import with
 svn import ~/TEMP/ http://example.co.uk/svn_wombat -m 'testing over http'

Worked perfectly.

Thanks.

Million dollar article. Thanks.

htpasswd -m dav_svn.passwd USERNAME

Try executing it with sudo or as root user

Hello,

Great article!

However, I need to create a user that has only read access to the same repository as the users that has full access. How can i accomplish that?

/Martin

Very helpful.. Thanks a ton..bertheymans

http://trikks.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/setup-a-subversion-svn-server-in-debian/

 :)

Hi, first nice toturial, i love it.

question, websvn runs in mod_fcgi? Cause i get:

Error 403!

Forbidden!

and

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /index.php on this server.

 thanks in advance

Nuno

Thank you for this tutorial. I still need to do some more homework on the whole svn+ssh part, but all the other stuff works fine.

 Rather than using websvn, I'll try to get Trac setup (http://trac.edgewall.org/)

-Piffer

Great instruction, very helpful.

Thank you a lot!

You'll bless you in all your way! 

Everything worked perfectly, everything is set up just how I needed it.  I didn't do the webSVN, don't think i'll need it soon, but I couldn't have asked for better instructions for the rest of it.  Way big thanks.

Yes its a really nice guide, but I would recommend to check out Git distrubuted version control. That is the best distrubuted version control out there. Here is a guide to install a repository server on linux debian distros. How to install and setup a Git Repository Server using Gitolite on Linux Ubuntu 10.04 & 11.04 [Development Environment]

Note that the DocumentRoot paths in your apache config files could be different to /var/www/websvn.  If you get an error when restarting apache, try finding your actual websvn directory using something like:

<code>
find / -path "*websvn/index.php"
</code>

 My path on debian (squeeze) was actually /usr/share/websvn/

Excellent article. All works perfect. Thank you for all about this.

Tavo.

To avoid facing the problem:

"Could not open the requested SVN filesystem" 

 Replace the instruction:

 chown -R www-data:subversion /var/svn-repos/*

 with

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

Good Day Everyone,

Is this article still relevant concerning securcurity 8 years after? It's very helpful and I'm setting up my SVN server per these instructions but I'd like to make changes for updated security enhacements as I go, if there are any.

Thanks!

Hi,

I followed this tutorial and now have all myy repositories available through the repository root.  I need to have each repository discrete from each other so users can access only the particular one we give them credentials to.

From what I read here each repo should be available using https://svn.example.com/repo-name but I'm getting a forbidden error:

You don't have permission to access /helpDocs on this server.

As I said, I can see and access all the repositories under https://svn.example.com but that gives all users access to all repostiories and the SVN software we use for documentation needs https://svn.example.com/repo-name.

I could post my config files here but this thread is pretty old, not sure if anyone will see this anyway...

Paul

libapache2-svn is deprecated? Debian 9: not found libapache2-svn.

Have you found a fix for this? I'm having the same error.

Thanks!

Its libapache2-mod-svn, isn't it?

note: currecnt debian dosn't contain websvn anymore (not maintained)

That's what I am seeing.  I used this document on an older version, but with no webSVN package how can one complete this?  Do I need to go back to 20.04?

Hi,

It took me some time to get this working, seems there is a name change in debian.

So:

   apt-get install libapache2-svn 

is not working, you should use

   apt-get install libapache2-mod-svn

After this i got it to work ok.

Thanks Peter,

so I start with a clean 22.04, set up Apache2 and PHP with https.  I then addsubversion and libapache2-mod-svn 

 apt install subversion libapache2-mod-svn 

what I don't understand is what replaces 

apt install websvn

what provides the php that the package websvn used to be put in /var/www/websvn under the new paradigm?  I tried looking for it with

fbsvnfind / -ind / -path "*websvn/index.php"

and I have none. 

I am clearly missing an important step, the one that used to be fulfilled with the websvn package that provides the php.  If I put a phpinfo() page at /var/www/wensvn/test.php it works but I have no other PHP on there and I am scratchng my head as to where it is supposed to come from if not the websvn package.