This is a simple how to set up your own subversion (SVN) repository on Slackware. When I wanted to set this up myself I found a document on how to set it up on a much older Slackware version so I created this to document on a more current version (14.2 as of this writing).

Subversion and its tools are installed by default in Slackware so you simply need a place to store the repository.

Start by creating a folder for the SVN repositories:

mkdir -p /home/svn/repositories 

Now we need to setup Apache

Edit /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

And uncomment the following three lines:

LoadModule dav_module lib64/httpd/modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule dav_svn_module lib64/httpd/modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module lib64/httpd/modules/mod_authz_svn.so

Now add a virtual host for the repository location to the Apache config:

 <Location /svn>
    DAV svn
    SVNParentPath /home/svn/repositories
    AuthzSVNAccessFile /home/svn/.svn-policy-file
    AuthName "Test SVN Repo"
    AuthType Basic
    AuthUserFile /home/svn/.svn-auth-file
    Satisfy Any
    Require valid-user
 </Location>

This sets up a simple path based authentication.

Now setup the svn root directory by creating /home/svn/.svn-policy-file:

Here the * gives read to all users and I gave myself (enine) read write access to a repository called test

 [/]
 * = r
 
 [test:/]
 enine = rw

Next we create the .svn-auth-file first user and the first user.

htpasswd -cs /home/svn/.svn-auth-file enine

-c tells htpasswd to create the file and -s uses sha1 for storing the password to add additional users simply remove the c option.

note that sha1 is not the most secure, you may wish to use htdigest or configure SSL in Apache to prevent password sniffing.

Now create a repository

svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /home/svn/repositories/test

–fs-type fsfs creats the file-system based repoistory

And give Apache permissions over it

chown -R apache:apache /home/svn/repositories/test

If you didn't have Apache already running enable it

chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd

And start Apache

/etc/rc.d/rc.httpd start

Now you can do a quick test

http://<server>/svn/test/

http://www.slackwiki.com/Subversion