setting up svn on a FreeBSD server with SSH access

Question

I'm not too familiar with this, and not a network administrator in general, but I am attempting to set up multiuser access to an svn repository on a local server.

So far I have installed subversion via

cd /usr/ports/devel/subversion
make install clean

Now I'm looking at how to configure and set up repositories and access. I have looked at the greatly useful SVN Book, however I'm looking for any examples/tutorials specific to FreeBSD.

The access to the respositories has to be via SSH.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Make sure you install the port with the svnserve wrapper enabled.

Note: Most--if not all--of the below commands must be executed as root.

Create an svn user group and add all the unix accounts you want to have access to it:

pw groupadd <group>
pw groupmod <group> -m <user>[,<user2>,...]

Then, create your repository:

svnadmin create /path/to/repos

Change its ownership to the group:

chown -R :svngroup /path/to/repos

Optionally, remove read-access from 'other' users:

chmod -R o-rwx /path/to/repos

And change permissions to allow group members sticky (append-only) access to the repository db:

find /path/to/repos/db | xargs chmod g+w
find /path/to/repos/db -type d | xargs chmod g+s

Test read access by ssh'ing as a user with svngroup membership:

svn info svn+ssh://user@host/path/to/repos

Test write access by creating your trunk dir (or whatever you want to call it):

svn mkdir svn+ssh://user@host/path/to/repos/trunk

You may be asked for your ssh password multiple times per svn command if you are not using key exchange.