SVN remote repository

Question

Hi folks, we're currently investigating SVN at work - having escalated our practices to include a fair bit of development. I have to confess, we're finding the remote setup process rather tricky, none of our team is that conversant with Linux/SSH.

My question is, how many of you you administer your own remote SVN repository versus using a 3rd party solution like Beanstalk?

An additional question: Do you use your remote SVN to commit changes to a live site, or do you use plain 'ole FTP to upload and reserve SVN simply for versioning?

Answer 1

I'm using private repositories instead of third-parties, works great. SVN+Apache can be a bit tricky, but using svn+ssh is pretty straightforward:

1. Install your repo in for example /var/svn/repo/.
2. Create a group all the committers are members of, for example "svn".
3. cd /var/svn/repo
4. chgrp -Rc svn . # Change all files to the svn group
5. find type -d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod +s # Set sticky bit on all directories to keep group on new files

That's all you need to do. Your repo address is now

svn+ssh://user@host/var/svn/repo

You can also create a symlink in the root directory to make it shorter:

$ cd /
$ ln -sv /var/svn/repo .

By doing that, you repo address is now

svn+ssh://user@host/repo

Answer 2

First question: 300 of us :-D But seriously, once the repo is set up then its relatively plain sailing from there. Which linux distro are you using? I've set up using Ubuntu for which there is loads of community help and tutorials out there.

Additional question: IMO you should use a build tool which would include running of tests and potentially any config tweaks for live environment. That gives you a bit more assurance that the site is not completely broken. Commiting to a repository (nowt else considered) gives no such assurance.

Answer 3

At my company, we run a Subversion Apache server on Windows 2003 for our development teams. I've had a little to do with administration, and documenting the setup and configuration which was previously undocumented.

I found the "Setting Up a Server" chapter of the TortoiseSVN documentation most helpful. It even explains how to integrate with Windows Active Directory for user authentication.

We've found it to be fairly low-maintenance, once it is set up and the back-up procedure is in place.

Answer 4

Have you considered using a Windows SVN server? Visual SVN Server is free to use and very easy to configure. The same company have also developed a Visual Studio plugin for SVN integration, too.

For a simple Windows client, I can recommend TortoiseSVN, which the Visual SVN plugin can interface with.