10 min project hosting & sharing

The only prereqs to this quick howto are that you have an ubuntu box and you know a thing or two about subversion. Preferably a shellhost – I use slicehost and i’ve heard great things about linode.com.

I use svn for many of my projects, and for my toolkit. Tonight i needed to quickly and securely share a few files from that toolkit, so i stuck websvn on a host, and configured htaccess authentication. Total time? 10 min. Here’s the setup.

(Yes, i know the cool kids are all on git now)

• Create subversion repository in /var/svn

cd /var/svn
svnadmin create repository

• install apache / websvn (apt-get install)

$apt-get install apache2 websvn

• Configure websvn – this is handled with the debian package, so when you’re done, your config (/etc/websvn/svn_deb_conf.inc) should look like this

<?php
// please edit /etc/websvn/config.php
// or use dpkg-reconfigure websvn
$config->parentPath("/var/svn/");
$config->addRepository("repository", "file:///var/svn/repository");
$config->setEnscriptPath("/usr/bin");
$config->setSedPath("/bin");
$config->useEnscript();
?>

• Create htpasswd file

$htpasswd -c -s /var/svn/htaccess testuser

• Configure htpasswd in apache config (/etc/websvn/apache.conf)

# Configuration for websvn using php4.
Alias /websvn /usr/share/websvn
<Directory /usr/share/websvn>
DirectoryIndex index.php
Options FollowSymLinks
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Subversion Repository"
Require valid-user
AuthUserFile /var/svn/htaccess
<IfModule mod_php4.c>
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc Off
php_flag track_vars On
</IfModule>
</Directory>

• Restart Apache and you’re done.

$/etc/init.d/apache2 restart