After fighting with the corporate firewall (ssh tunnels were not successfully able to navigate to a SVN repo on a shared host) I decided I should set subversion up on my home server. Since I am a little paranoid about throwing caution to the wind with regard to server changes, I decided to set it up on my Fedora 8 vmware partition.

Here was my process.

# yum install subversion

Ok, that was pretty easy. I now have subversion installed on my system; both from a client and user’s perspective. Next I need to create a subversion repository location on my disk (/svn can be replaced with any location on your server).

# svnadmin create /svn

In /svn/conf/passwd add the following (it is in plaintext, but I am sure there is an encrypted solution):

[users]
achristopher = some secret, yet plaintext password

In the /svn/conf/svnserve.conf, you should set the following:

[general]
anon-access = read
auth-access = write

realm = Test Repo

There, our subversion repository has been set up. Now all we have to do is start the subversion daemon.

# svnserv -r /svn -d

We can test the subversion repo:

# mkdir /tmp/test

# svnlook tree /svn
/
svn/
test/

We have just added a directory to our subversion repository. Now lets checkout this project, and get to work:

# rm -Rf /tmp/test
# svn checkout svn://localhost/svn/test
Checked out revision 1.


I cheated a little there, because I had entered my password before I created this posting, so you can expect to see something like the following:

Authentication realm: Test Repo
Password for ‘achristopher’:

Just enter your password (the one entered in plain text above) and continue working.

To follow: How to set subversion to work with xinetd (it isnt that exciting, but definitely new post worthy).