Setup Subversion (SVN) Repositories on Debian/Ubuntu

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This article is outdated and may not work correctly for current operating systems or software.

Install required packages

We are going run SVN under xinetd for low resource usages.

apt-get install xinetd subversion

Create svn user

adduser --system --home /var/svn --disabled-password --disabled-login --group svn

Create your first repository

svnadmin create /var/svn/repositories

Run following commands to insert settings into /var/svn/repositories/conf/svnserve.conf

cat >/var/svn/repositories/conf/svnserve.conf <<EOF

[general]

anon-access = none

auth-access = write

password-db = passwd

authz-db    = authz



[sasl]

EOF

Edit /var/svn/repositories/conf/passwd to add user and password.

Insert:

[users]

YOUR_USERNAME = YOUR_PASSWORD

Edit /var/svn/repositories/conf/authz to modify user permission.

Example:

[/]

YOUR_USERNAME = rw



[/example.com]

YOUR_USERNAME = rw

other = r</pre>

Note: r = read only; rw = read & write

Run following commands to create a xinetd configuration file for Subversion at /etc/xinetd.d/svnserve

cat >/etc/xinetd.d/svnserve <<EOF

service svn

{

        port        = 3690

        socket_type = stream

        protocol    = tcp

        wait        = no

        user        = svn

        server      = /usr/bin/svnserve

        server_args = -i -r /var/svn/repositories

}

EOF

Restart xinetd, and you are done.

/etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Final Check

Make sure Subversion is running using following command:

netstat -ant | grep ':3690'

You should see something like this if Subversion is running:

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:3690            0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN

Remember to open port 3690 if you have firewall installed.

You can now access your Subversion repository using svn://YOUR_HOST/ from any SVN client.

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