Setting up and configuring Subversion on a linux server

Question

I've been using subversion a lot via a managed solution. Now I wanted to move into my own server to save money, so I asked my host to setup subversion on my VPS. Here's what they said:

If you need the Subversion server, (...) it depends a lot on the configuration you'd like. If you can provide us with the installation instructions you'd like us to use, we can set up the SVN server for you.

I have no idea what configuration I should use, nor how to guide them to set it up.

Any tips? resources I could send them maybe?

Your help is much appreciated

Answer 1

If you need the Subversion server, (...) it depends a lot on the configuration you'd like.

Most of the setup is pretty well covered in the SVN documentation, what you probably need to provide them with is the policy decisions. How do you want your SVN server to operate?

• Is your svn server going to be available to the public, or are you going to require authentication to access it.
• Do you want to use some external system for authentication (ldap, other)?
• Do you want to use svn via http, ssh or svnserve.
• Do you want web interfaces like websvn installed?
• Do you need to setup permissions so that some users can only access certain portions of the repository?
• Do you need them to setup multiple repositories?
• How do you want to handle backups?

---

I thought you wanted me to answer these questions. I'll send them my answers and see if it gets anywhere.

• No, I'd like to have authentication.
• Not sure what that is really.
• Whatever is best, I don't know. I do most of my stuff via TortoiseSVN.
• WebSVN would be nice
• Not really, I don't need that at this point.
• I'd like to have the ability to setup multiple repositories myself.
• I don't know. If there's an automatic way, I'd probably want to do that.

Given your requirements it seems like you are the only one using this repository? It sure seems like all you need is shell (ssh) access to the a system that has the svn package installed. Once you have SSH access you can simply create your repositories as needed and then use SSH for access.