After reading various other howto's on setting up SVN, and then finally getting it to work, I thought I would write up what worked for me, in the hope that this may help others.

The source of this useful application can be found here: subversion.tigris.org

This howto assumes you have at least the following setup:

  Fedora 8 with Apache version 2.2.6.

We have SELinux turned off, until we can get subversion to work correctly with it turned on.

And, we will assume the following dummy IP addresses and port of the server for the rest of the article: (replace these with your own IP, and port values)

  external IP: 55.444.444.55

  internal lan IP: 192.168.1.200

  svn port: 8080

And with the basic network setup:

 internet  <-->  modem  <-->  router  <-->  server

Most of the operations here will require that you have access to the root account, as always.

I like to use the yum extender and an http gui to manipulate apache's settings, so those need to be installed:

  > yum -y install yumex

This installs a gui for yum, which can be found, after a successful install on the desktop at:

  Applications > Yum Extender

Using the yum extender, we can see what has already been installed or not, on the linux machine. So, we should make sure that the Apache server is installed, and also install the Apache configuration tool (the http gui):

  httpd

  system-config-httpd

We also need to install the Apache server module for the subversion server:

  mod_dav_svn

Next, to install SVN subversion we can go back to the command line, and install it using yum:

  > yum install subversion

I also like being able to watch the ethernet packets flowing through the network while debugging this installation, so use your preferred indicator. You can add a system monitor to a panel, or install GKrellm. This can be found with the yum extender:

  gkrellm

With these installations complete we can begin to create the necessary directories and modifying the various configuration files.

As root, create the following directory:

  > mkdir -p /var/www/svn/repository

change to that directory,

  > cd /var/www/svn/repository

and create a test repository,

  > svnadmin create test_svn

Actually, these SVN directories can be placed anywhere, as long as you keep track of the correct path for the modifications that will need to be added later to the configuration files.

Next, change directory, and set the ownership so that Apache can access the SVN directories.

  > cd /var/www

  > chown -R apache.apache svn

Next, we modify Apache's settings.

continued on page 2

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