Ubuntu 12 - Set Up An SVN Server

Introduction

This tutorial aims to set up an SVN service on an Ubuntu 12.04 server, which will be accessed remotely with the SVN protocol. E.g you would put something like svn://my-site.com/my-project-name instead of http://my-site.com/my-project.

Install all the necessary packages and dependencies:
sudo apt-get install subversion
Create a directory for where you want to store your repos. Personally, I use /home/svn
sudo mkdir $SVN-ROOT-DIRECTORY
Create a repository
cd $SVN-ROOT-DIRECTORY
sudo svnadmin create "my-new-project"
Start the SVN service and specify the root directory where your repos are located:
svnserve -d -r $SVN-ROOT-DIRECTORY
To automatically start the service on boot so that you dont have to run the previous step every time you reboot:
crontab -e
Add the following line to the bottom of the file:
@reboot /usr/bin/svnserve -d --root $SVN-ROOT-DIRECTORY
Thats it! Now you can checkout the repository by entering the following command on your computer:
svn checkout svn://$SERVER-IP-ADDRESS/my-new-project
Obviously if you create a subdirectory in future and then put a repo in there, it would be something like this:
svn checkout svn://$SERVER-IP-ADDRESS/my-sub-directory/my-new-project

Optional Configurations

Obviously, just doing the steps above isn't very safe. Depending on how you set up, almost anyone might be able to checkout/manipulate your code! I will now show you various ways to protect your code.

Use a Firewall To Block Access

You could use a VPN to allow you to have a 'static ip', then set up a firewall to block everything except traffic from that IP.

sudo apt-get install ufw
sudo ufw allow from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
sudo ufw default deny
sudo ufw enable

Creating SVN Users

The following steps will set it up so that only users you create can checkout and update to your repository. I have left out lots of other possible configurations, as this is the basic one people will probably want. Just note that it is possible to set it up so that anonymous users can checkout your repo, but not commit to it, should you desire (if so just read the comments in the files)

Navigate to the configuration files inside your repository
cd $SVN-ROOT-DIRECTORY/$MY-REPO-NAME/conf
Edit the authz file to be something like this (only these lines need to be uncommented):
[/]
$authenticated = rw

This will set up the repo so that only authenticated users can check it out or commit to it.
Edit the passwd file and add users (plaintext password). E.g This added the 'stuart' user with the password 'test'
[users]
stuart=test
Edit the svnserve file so that the daemon will make use of the previous two files we just changed.
vim svnserve.conf
Make sure these lines are uncommented and have these values (helps if you use vim, then uncommented lines are green):
anon-access = none
auth-access = write
password-db = passwd
authz-db = authz

References

• Ubuntu Docs - Subversion