How to configure Subversion svn with Apache

This tutorial will show step by step how to configure Apache, how to password protect and create your first repository.

Requirements

• Apache
• Subversion

I won’t go in to details how to install but if you use Fedora, use yum. If you don’t know how to install Apache, try Google for your Linux dist.

Step 1 – Create a new empty svn repository

Make sure you are root or have root access. To create the repository use svnadmin, I will create it in /var/www/svn. Path is not important so you can go ahead and choose any path you want.

svnadmin create /var/www/svn

Step 2 – Create file structure and import to repository

In Subversion you should establish the trunk,tags and branches directory. So we will do this too. Start with creating a folder, preferably in your /tmp directory. Create a directory called svn in /tmp with 3 subdirectories called “branches”, “tags” and “trunk”.

Import those into svn with following command:

svn import /tmp/svn file:///var/www/svn -m "first import"

You will get a reply that directories been added and that you committed revision 1.

Step 3 – Authentication

You don’t want your files public so you will need to do some authorization for your svn. I’ll use the basic and store passwords in a htpasswd file. Store this file within your svn directory.

htpasswd -cb /var/www/svn/htpasswd user1 Pass1

Step 4 – Apache setup

You will need to add a virtual host setup to be able to access it from outside with your domain. You will always be able to access svn from your local file system. I will use “svn.domain.com” in this example.

<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName svn.domain.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/svn
	ErrorLog /var/www/logs/svn_error_log
        <Directory /var/www/svn>
                AllowOverride All
                Options MultiViews -Indexes Includes FollowSymlinks
                <IfModule mod_access.c>
                        Order allow,deny
                        Allow from all
                </IfModule>
        </Directory>
 
        # WebDAV access
        <Location />
                DAV svn
                SVNPath /var/www/svn
                AuthType Basic
                AuthName "Your message for this realm"
                AuthUserFile /var/www/svn/htpasswd
                Require valid-user
 
                # authentication
                <LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
                        Require valid-user
                </LimitExcept>
        </Location>
</VirtualHost>

Now, do a config test first before restarting Apache

service httpd configtest

Step 5 – Restart Apache

When config test says “Syntax OK” its time to restart your httpd. Try and accesss http://svn.domain.com and a authentication dialog pops up, enter your username and password. If everything works fine you should see those three directories you added earlier.

Troubleshooting

I came across a few errors when doing this

Unknown DAV provider: svn

If you get the message “Unknown DAV provider: svn”, you’re missing two important Apache modules. Edit your httpd.conf and look for these modules and uncomment

• dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so
• authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so

If you using Fedora, you can use yum to install those packages

yum install mod_dav_svn

Then try and restart, if those modules are working apache shouldn’t have any problems starting up.

403 – Forbidden

Make sure your Apache user, default apache has read and write access to /var/www/svn/db. Also check so the rest of the files are readable.

Activities.d can’t write on commit

Make sure that apache has full read and write access to /var/www/svn/dav and /var/www/svn/dav/activities.d

Setting up a web server

Learn how to configure a web server from home, read more