Using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server for Subversion

My old subversion server is in need of a bit of an upgrade. I decided to move it to one of my VMware ESXi servers. (Yes, I really have ESXi servers in my basement. What can I say?) Anyway, since this is a low volume service, moving to an ESXi server seems to be the most economical way to keep my code safe without running the power bill (any farther) through the roof.

Since I have enough VMs to keep track of, I am going to build this one on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, since Ubuntu seems easier to keep up-to-date. However, taking you step-by-step through the installation isn't something I am going to do. Rather, I will comment on any "non-standard" steps I take, and then include all of the follow-up information needed to get the subversion server up and running.

When I installed the server, I didn't select any of the options on the type of server I wanted to set up. Instead, I just continued past that screen and completed the installation. Once the machine rebooted, I logged in with the account I created, and got to work.

The first two things you will probably want to do is set a static IP address for your server, and install the openssh server so you can work on the machine remotely. Setting the static IP is easy. Good instructions can be found here : http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/change-ubuntu-server-from-dhcp-to-a-static-ip-address/. Installing OpenSSH is also easy. At the server's command line run the command "sudo apt-get install openssh-server".

Once the IP address is set, you will either need to reboot the machine, or manually change the address by hand. I suggest a quick reboot, as it shouldn't take too long. Once the machine reboots, we can get on to setting up and configuring the subversion server.

There are several different ways to configure a subversion server. And I have used many of them. By far, my preferred method is to do subversion over http as the Tortoise SVN client for Windows will let me cache my username and password in this mode, and not have to enter it a bunch of times anytime I do any work in the repository.

So, the first thing we need to do is install Apache. I went ahead and installed it using the command "sudo apt-get install apache2". After a few seconds, I had Apache installed and ready to rock.

The next thing I needed to do was actually install subversion. This is easily done by running the command "sudo apt-get install subversion". After a few more seconds, I had subversion installed.

If we Google around, we can find some information on what to do next at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Subversion. The only problem is, that I am using the server version, so the UI steps are of little help. But no problem, we can easily do the same thing from the command line!

First, we want to create a subversion group to use. To do that, we need to run the command "sudo addgroup subversion". You should get a message indicating that the group was added, along with listing the GID (group ID) of the group that was just created.

To do that, run the command "sudo nano /etc/group", then find the group we just created, and add both "www-data" and your username to the end of the subversion group line.

Now, you should be a member of the subversion group, but you will need to log out and back in before the change will take affect. So do that now.

Next, we need to create the directories to store the files that we upload via subversion. To do that, execute the following commands :

cd /home
sudo mkdir svn
cd svn
sudo mkdir repo
sudo svnadmin create /home/svn/repo


Then, fix the permissions with these commands :

cd /home/svn
sudo chown -R www-data:subversion repo
sudo chmod -R g+rws repo

Now, to bring things full circle, we need to make sure we have the Apache 2 SVN libraries installed. To do that, run the command "sudo apt-get install libapache2-svn".

Now, we need to edit the Apache config so that it knows how to deal with the subversion requests. Change in to the directory /etc/apache2/mods-available, and run the command "sudo nano dav_svn.conf". Then, add the following block to the end of the file to enable subversion through Apache :


DAV svn
SVNPath /home/svn/repo
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Subversion Repository"
AuthUserFile /etc/subversion/passwd

Require valid-user




Whew! This is a lot of work. BUT, we are almost there! The last thing we need to do is set up authentication for the web interface so that not just anyone can muck around in our repository. Doing that is easy. Run the command "sudo htpasswd -c /etc/subversion/passwd " where is replaced with the user name you want to use to log in. To add additional users, use the same command line, but remove the "-c" option. (If you don't remove the -c option you will erase the first user you created!!!)

Congratulations! At this point, you should have a subversion server all set up! To access the server, you would use the URL http://

/svn .