Installing SVN on Mac OS X 10.4 and accessing it using svn+ssh:// URL

Question

I wanted to setup SVN repository on a network machine running Mac OSX 10.4. I downloaded and installed subversion from HERE.

I installed the package, and in order to call the Subversion commands from every directory, i followed the following instructions:

1. Open Terminal.

2. Enter following command.

   $ pico .bash_profile

3. Add the following line to the text file:

   export PATH=/opt/subversion/bin/:$PATH"

4. Now hit Control-X, then confirm saving the file with 'y', followed by return.

After this, i was able to successfully create an svn repository on a remote machine. Now i want to access that repository using Xcode. But i think i'm missing something because i'm unable to access the repository using "svn+ssh://..." URL. There are many online articles that talk about svnserve and ssh, but i don't get. I'll appreciate if anyone can explain to me what I'm missing, and the logic behind that.

With Mac OS X 10.5.x, the SVN environment is already setup, so the SVN repository can be accessed using "svn+ssh://..." URL. But i want to use a remote machine running Mac OS X 10.4.x for my SVN repository, and that's where I'm stuck.

Any help in this regard is greatly appreciated.

p.s. I'm new to this SVN, SSH, SCM stuff

Answer 1

I doubt that you've done the steps to authorize multiuser access to the repository. Since preconfigured svn+ssh has been the default on Mac OS X for the last two major OS versions, it's not that easy to find decent documentation, but this might give you some good pointers. It's from 2007 so probably covers 10.4.

The main thing is that you need to gather the public keys of everybody who's going to be accessing the repository (that may be just you) and add their user name and public key to the authorized_keys file.