Install and run SVN server on Linux with browser based administration GUI

This article should describe how to install and setup a SVN server on Linux Debian Lenny. The instructions may also work for other Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat and Open Suse.

1. Install the packages necessary for the SVN server

apt-get install php-pear libapache2-svn subversion

pear install -f -o VersionControl_SVN

Setup the repository root directory.

mkdir -p /var/lib/svn/repos
touch /var/lib/svn/htpasswd
touch /var/lib/svn/accessfile
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/lib/svn

2. Configurate the dav_svn module in Apache2

nano /etc/apache2/mods-available/dav_svn.conf

Add the following lines or make sure they are not commented (no leading #). There might be more content between the location tags but below are the values that have to be there with those values.

<Location /svn>
  DAV svn
  SVNParentPath /var/lib/svn/repos
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName “Subversion Repository”
  AuthUserFile /var/lib/svn/htpasswd
  # SSLRequireSSL
  AuthzSVNAccessFile /var/lib/svn/accessfile

  Require valid-user

</Location>

3. Download SVNManager and setup

Change into the folder for the apache server pages. By default that is /var/www.

cd /var/www

Create the folder for the svnmanager and download the svnmanager file there. Check on svnmanager.org for the current version and right click on the download link and copy the link address.

mkdir svnmanger
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/svnmanager/svnmanager-1.08.tar.gz

After the download is done extract the archive and copy the files into the "nice folder".

tar xvfz svnmanager-1.xx.tar.gz
cp -R svnmanager-1.xx/* /var/www/svnmanager

Enable the default linux config file.

cd /var/www/svnmanager
cp config.php.linux config.php

Enable the dav_svn module for apache2.

a2enmod dav_svn
invoke-rc.d apache2 restart

4. Edit the config.php

nano config.php

Change the lines to following values.

<?php
//Shell command’s
$htpassword_cmd = “/usr/bin/htpasswd”;
$svn_cmd = “/usr/bin/svn”;
$svnadmin_cmd = “/usr/bin/svnadmin”;

//Subversion
$svn_repos_loc = “/var/lib/svn/repos”;
$svn_passwd_file= “/var/lib/svn/htpasswd”;
$svn_access_file= “/var/lib/svn/accessfile”;

//SMTP Server
$smtp_server = “localhost”;

//Database
$dsn =”mysqli://svnmanager:password@localhost/svnmanager”;

//Administrator account
$admin_name=”admin”;
$admin_temp_password=”admin”;

5. Create Databases and User Account

If you have phpmyadmin installed (e.g. via ttp://your-ip/phpmyadmin) you can create a new database there called svnmanager. Also create a user (e.g. svnuser) with password and grant select, insert, update, delete, create, drop, alter rights.

If you don't have phpmyadmin run following commands:

mysql -u root -p -e”CREATE DATABASE svnmanager; \
GRANT select, insert, update, delete, create, drop, alter on svnmanager.* to ’svnmanager’@'localhost’ identified by ‘password’; \
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

6. Create admin user in SVN Manager and create repository and grant access

With the Administrator account configured in the config.php login to your svnmanager at http://your-IP/svnmanager. Create a new user with administrator rights there. Because for security reasons you can not use the initial administrator account to create repositories and users.

So log out and login with the new admin user and setup repositories users and privileges.
Repositories created via SVNManager look like:
http://your-ip/svn/repository-name

7. Troubleshooting for Linux Debian Lenny

For Linux Debian Lenny following bug is known. A locale setting problem can occur if en_US.UTF-8 is not used. This can be fixed with the following steps.

apt-get install locales
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
dpkg-reconfigure locales (run the command and select en_US.UTF-8 as default)

reboot