Configure SVN

Configure SVN Organic Design procedure

Setting up the SVN repository

The necessary packages should already have been installed as part of the organicdesign-server package, but if not, you'll need to apt-get install subversion libapache2-svn. Then the first step is to create the repositories as in the following example.

mkdir /svn svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /svn/extensions svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /svn/tools

Next create a subversion group and add your developers to it:

groupadd subversion addgroup earl subversion addgroup tabatha subversion chown -R www-data:subversion /svn/* chmod -R 775 /svn/*

Logging Commits

Create a post-commit hook in your /svn/REPO/hooks/post-commit (change REPO accordingly) file containing the following:

#!/bin/sh echo "$1 repo updated to revision $2" >> /var/log/svn.log

Create a file to log the commits to and set permissions of the log and hook script:

chmod 775 /svn/REPO/hooks chown www-data:subversion /svn/REPO/hooks touch /var/log/svn.log chmod 660 /var/log/svn.log chown www-data:subversion /var/log/svn.log

Configuring client access

The first issue with client access over SSH is that we use a non-standard port, but there is no svn switch to set this, so we need to create a specific tunnel in the subversion configuration for our server with the correct port set. Add the following to the tunnels section of ~/.subversion/config file using your own servers name and SSH port.

od = /usr/bin/ssh -p 1729

You will now be able to check out a repository or branch using the following syntax (the USER@ portion is only required if you are connecting from root or another users shell session).

svn co svn+od://USER@svn.organicdesign.co.nz/svn/foo/bar /my/local/path/to/foo/bar

Note that you will be required to enter your SSH password for every transaction with the svn repository, so the following steps are required to get rid of this annoying problem.

Configuring local root access

To create working copies of repositories on the same server that the repositories are hosted on we need to be able to checkout under the root user, so that all users with root access can update the running scripts. The problem with this though is that we use svn+ssh but ssh access is not permitted for the root user. To get round this the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file can be modified slightly to allow root logins, but only from localhost.

AllowUsers root@localhost bob tabatha PermitRootLogin yes

To checkout a working copy on the localhost, use the syntax in the following example:

svn co svn+od://localhost/svn/extensions

WebSVN

MediaWiki uses viewvc for web viewing of their svn repositories, but the installation and configuration are a bit of a pain since its a Python CGI script rather than PHP like all our other web applications. So for this reason we're using the PHP websvn from Tigris instead.

Installation of websvn is a simple matter of downloading into /var/www/domains/websvn and creating a sub-domain and virtual host entry for it as for any other PHP web application. Next make a copy of the default config file:

cd /var/www/domains/websvn/include cp distconfig.php config.php

And add a single entry in the repositories section pointing at the parent directory of your repositories, for example:

$config->parentPath('/svn');

You may want to add or adjust the file extensions used for syntax highlighting, each language is an array key with an array of file-extensions as its value. For example, we wanted our wikid.conf.sample file to be highlighted as Perl, so we added the following line to add "sample" to the extensions list under the "perl" key:

$extGeshi['perl'][] = 'sample';

And that's all there is to it! no simply browse to your sub-domain, ours is http://svn.organicdesign.co.nz