Setup Subversion (SVN) Repositories on Debian/Ubuntu

Install Required Packages

We are going to run SVN under xinetd for low resource usage.

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 the 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 a user and a 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>

Run the following commands to create an 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 the 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 the port 3690 If you have a firewall installed.

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