Subversion Notes

Cheat Sheet

Sparse Checkouts

Subversion supports ‘sparse checkouts’, which will check out just the top level of a repository’s directory hierarchy;

svn co svn://my-repository/ . --depth immediates

To get the full contents of a specific directory with this checkout;

cd cad
svn update --set-depth infinity

Setting Up a Repository

Notes on setting up a simple Subversion repository using svnserve.

Create a separate user account for the Subversion process;

/sbin/useradd -r svn
mkdir /srv/svn
#chown svn /srv/svn
svnadmin create repo --fs-type fsfs
chown -R svn repo

Allow anonymous reads and writes, for testing;

cat /srv/svn/repo/conf/svnserve.conf
[general]
anon-access = write
auth-access = write

Create a Systemd service;

cat /etc/systemd/system/svnserve.service
[Unit]
Description=Subversion protocol daemon
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
RuntimeDirectory=svnserve
PIDFile=/run/svnserve/svnserve.pid
EnvironmentFile=/etc/default/svnserve
ExecStart=/usr/bin/svnserve $DAEMON_ARGS
User=svn
Group=svn
KillMode=control-group
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Create a directory for Subversion to store its logs;

mkdir /var/log/subversion
chown svn /var/log/subversion

Provide a configuration file with arguments to the svnserve process;

cat /etc/default/svnserve
DAEMON_ARGS="--daemon --pid-file /run/svnserve/svnserve.pid --root /srv/svn/repo --log-file /var/log/svnserve/svnserve.log"