WebSVN To Monitor Subversion Repositories

Subversion (SVN) is a version control system initiated in 2000 by CollabNet Inc. It is used to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly-compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). Subversion is well-known in the open source community and is used on many open source projects.

Subversion was started in 2000 as an effort to write a free version control system which operated much like CVS but with fixed bugs and misfeatures in CVS. By 2001, Subversion was sufficiently developed to be capable of hosting its own source code. More information, including this above paragraphs, is here.

Getting started with SVN

Please refer to my earlier post.

Managing websites with SVN

Please refer to my previous post.

Getting ready for WebSVN

Let us assume that /var/www/mydomain_repos will serve as the DocumentRoot for viewing our subversion repositories/projects via web and that the corresponding URL will be http://repos.mydomain.com/. Let us also assume that this location is already in existence. The Apache configuration file, /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, needs to have the following in it [one can add more stuff]:

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# WebSVN - password protected
 
  UseCanonicalName Off
  DocumentRoot /var/www/mydomain_repos
  ServerName repos.mydomain.com
  ServerSignature On
  DirectoryIndex index.html index.php index.cgi index.pl
  AccessFileName .htaccess
 
# Main Directory
  <Directory "/var/www/mydomain_repos">
    AuthName "Reserved for developers only!"
    AuthType Basic
    AuthUserFile /var/www/mydomain_repos/.htpasswd
    AuthGroupFile /dev/null
    require valid-user
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all

Once these changes are saved, Apache needs to be restarted.

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/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Once that’s done, one can download the latest and greatest stable version from websvn.info and suppose that it’s downloaded to $HOME/Desktop.

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cd /tmp
mkdir WEBSVN
cd WEBSVN
tar -zxvpf $HOME/Desktop/websvn-x.y.z.tar.gz
 
cd /var/www/mydomain_repos/
cp -rf /tmp/WEBSVN/websvn-x.y.z/* .
 
# Needed for RSS feed to work properly
chmod 777 cache
 
cd include
cp distconfig.php config.php

Customizing WebSVN – /var/www/mydomain_repos/include/config.php

Included below are portions of my copy of config.php that I have edited to make it work for this set up:

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// {{{ PLATFORM CONFIGURATION ---
//
// Configure these lines if your commands aren't on your path.
$config->setSVNCommandPath('/usr/bin');
$config->setDiffPath('/usr/bin');
 
// For syntax colouring, if option enabled...
$config->setEnscriptPath('/usr/bin');
$config->setSedPath('/bin');
 
// For delivered tarballs, if option enabled...
$config->setTarPath('/bin');
 
// For delivered GZIP'd files and tarballs, if option enabled...
$config->setGZipPath('/bin');
 
// }}}
 
// {{{ REPOSITORY SETUP ---
//
// Remote repositories (without and with optional group):
$config->addRepository('mydomain', 'http://svn.mydomain.com/', NULL, 'svn-userid', 'svn-password');
 
// }}}

If the system does not have enscript, it may be installed using the command:

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# Run as root
yum install enscript

Does it work?

When the browser is pointed to http://repos.mydomain.com/, it prompts for UserID/Password and then displays a following looking screen, it should be working.

Troubleshooting

I followed every step as mentioned. http://repos.mydomain.com/ opens fine and shows only the project name. When I click on it, I don’t see anything else. What’s going on?

I had that problem as well. It took me a while and I thought there was something wrong with the way I had configured Subversion and/or WebSVN. As it turned out, the current [latest, stable] release of WebSVN (2.1.0) requires Subversion 1.2 (or greater), and my instance was 1.1.4. The following command may be used to check the version of Subversion:

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svn --version --quiet

CentOS 4.x didn’t have any further updates available for subversion but Dag Wieers repository had the necessary packages. I downloaded subversion-1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf.i386.rpm, mod_dav_svn-1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf.i386.rpm and installed them using the command:

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# Run as root
rpm -Uvh subversion-1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf.i386.rpm mod_dav_svn-1.4.6-0.1.el4.rf.i386.rpm

That resolved the issue – WebSVN elegantly displayed the project(s) in the repository and all relevant information.