Giving apache user the rights to modify subversion repositories

Question

I'm developing a front end to our subversion setup using WebDAV, XSL stylesheets and some php scripts to interface the svn binary. I wrote a simple shell script that sets up a project based on our tech policy (pretty standard stuff). However, the script won't run properly when executed by the apache user _www (OS X server). It complain's about not getting a password for _www. We do authentication through open directory so there are no .htaccess files controlling the authentication.

Can I somehow grant access to _www without having to type a password so that my scripts can run non interactive?

Adding this to Limit didn't help (although, removing the Limit tag altogether from the conf obviously works!):

Require user  _www _www@MYSERVER

It should be noted that _www has recursive ownership rights to directory that holds my repositories.

Answer 1

If the subversion repository resides on the same machine as the web server, the solution is fairly simple. You just have to

chown -R _www /path/to/repo

and that should be enough. Make sure the user has read/write access (and execute on the directories). Make sure you access the repository through the file:/// protocol and you will not require a password at all.

If the repository needs to be owned by another user, you could use groups to set the permissions instead.

If you have a remote repository, things become a little more complicated. If that's the case, I'll revise my answer then :)