SVN (which stands for Subversion) is a version control system. So let me speak some english here for you. Lets say you make a website for a customer. When you are finished it is version 1. A month or so later the customer calls you back and wants to add a page or 2. This would then be version 2. So you upload ver 2 to replace ver 1 and the customer hates it. Oh my I did not back up ver 1 and there are many changes that happened. Well if you are using SVN you can go in and tell the code to revert back to ver 1 and then upload those files and you are a happy camper.

Well with the quick explaining what the SVN is, now lets show you how to setup the server for this. I will be installing this on a Ubuntu 9.04 box. I have tested this way with versions 8.04 and 8.10. Now I am assuming that you have Apache 2 and up already installed and configured.

Lets installing the app Subversion and install the apache module libapache2-svn

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jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get update
jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install subversion libapache2-svn

Now that we got that installed lets add a new group for subversion

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jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo addgroup subversion

Next we make a main directory that will hold all of our SVN. You can have multiple sites or repositories as they are called for different sites or projects

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jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo mkdir /home/svn

Note: There is really no wrong place that you can setup the svn directory
Now we just need to make some permission changes to the directory we just made

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jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo chown -R www-data:subversion /home/svn
jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo chmod -R g+rws /home/svn

Next we are going to create the SVN. For this example I will name the SVN myWebsite . Now you can name your repository pretty much anything you want.

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jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo svnadmin create /home/svn/myWebsite

We now have the SVN setup but now we need to get this configure so users can now connect to this SVN. We now need to edit /etc/apache2/mods- available/dav_svn.conf and make some changes to that file. You can add the following to the end of the file

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    DAV svn
    SVNPath /home/svn/myWebsite
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "myWebsite subversion repository"
    AuthUserFile /etc/subversion/passwd
       Require valid-user

If you have multiple repositories you would just add another section and change myWebsite to the name of the other repo. Now lets add 2 username and passwords that can connect to the SVN.

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jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo htpasswd -c /etc/subversion/passwd jcostanzo
       # You are prompted for the password. Go ahead and make one up  
jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo htpasswd /etc/subversion/passwd bsmith
       # Notice we took out the -c This is due to the -c is a flag that creates the passwd file.

Lets go ahead and finish up

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jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo chown -R www-data:subversion myWebsite
jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo chmod -R g+rws myWebsite
jcostanzo@virtual-ubuntu:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That is it. You know have a working SVN server. In a later tutorial I will show you how to setup an SVN client to connect to this repositories. Below is a youtube video showing you how to do what I described above.