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So there are several similar questions on serverfault ... but the solution is still eluding me.

I am running subversion on Ubuntu 9.04 .. through apache2.2.x ....

I get 

Commit failed (details follow):

Can't make directory '/home/kirb/svn/dav/activities.d': Permission denied

when I attempt to commit.

It is definitely a permissions issue... but how to fix it is still eluding me.

My repository is in /home/kirb/svn.

SVN Commit Error says to chgrp .. but I don't seem to be able to. All the apache DAV stuff seems to be working though. I can access my repository just fine through a browser.

Apologies if i am missing something simple here.

Thanks in advance, Kirb

additional edit: I am not able to sudo chgrp on the directory at all

sudo chgrp -R www-data /home/kirb/svn; chmod -R g+rwx /home/kirb/svn
[sudo] password for kirb:
chmod: changing permissions of `/home/kirb/svn': Operation not permitted
chmod: changing permissions of `/home/kirb/svn/format': Operation not permitted
chmod: changing permissions of `/home/kirb/svn/conf': Operation not permitted
chmod: cannot read directory `/home/kirb/svn/conf': Permission denied
chmod: changing permissions of `/home/kirb/svn/locks': Operation not permitted
chmod: cannot read directory `/home/kirb/svn/locks': Permission denied
chmod: changing permissions of `/home/kirb/svn/db': Operation not permitted
chmod: cannot read directory `/home/kirb/svn/db': Permission denied
chmod: changing permissions of `/home/kirb/svn/README.txt': Operation not permitted
chmod: changing permissions of `/home/kirb/svn/hooks': Operation not permitted
chmod: cannot read directory `/home/kirb/svn/hooks': Permission denied
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4
  • You'll need to provide a bit more info. What URI are you using to checkin/out? When you say "it's working though a browser", do you mean read-only access? Who is Apache running as? +any other detail you can see...
    – Jonathan Matthews
    Mar 11, 2010 at 15:20
  • i'd like not to share my subversion uri... but yes myurl.com/svn allows me to login and read the files in the repository.
    – hiddenkirby
    Mar 11, 2010 at 16:14
  • i can check out using tortoise on my local machine (not my server) ... i just cannot commit
    – hiddenkirby
    Mar 11, 2010 at 16:15
  • 1
    In my case, I had to create the dav folder before it would work.
    – Aaron
    Dec 17, 2010 at 17:58

2 Answers 2

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5

You need to change the svn files to be in the www-data group, and make them all group-writable. For example, if the repository is /var/svn, then

sudo chown -R root:www-data /var/svn
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/svn

should do it. (Although, come to think of it, you've probably already figured this out...)

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1
  • thank you for answering and taking the time. hopefully this helps future people.
    – hiddenkirby
    Mar 25, 2010 at 17:23
0

Since you accessing the folder with apache, probably the user www-data needs to be able to read/write the folder.

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3
  • i have ran ... sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /home/kirb/svn/* 481 sudo chmod -R 770 /home/kirb/svn/*
    – hiddenkirby
    Mar 11, 2010 at 16:12
  • Did it work? In your original post you did not run chmod with sudo, that's why it failed.
    – Dan Andreatta
    Mar 12, 2010 at 9:31
  • running it with sudo still gave me permissions errors. havent gotten it to work yet.
    – hiddenkirby
    Mar 15, 2010 at 16:02

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