Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

Creating and Configuring Your Repository

Earlier in this chapter (in Strategies for Repository Deployment), we looked at some of the important decisions that should be made before creating and configuring your Subversion repository. Now, we finally get to get our hands dirty! In this section, we’ll see how to actually create a Subversion repository and configure it to perform custom actions when special repository events occur.

Creating the Repository

Subversion repository creation is an incredibly simple task. The svnadmin utility that comes with Subversion provides a subcommand (svnadmin create) for doing just that.

$ # Create a repository
$ svnadmin create /var/svn/repos
$

This creates a new repository in the directory /var/svn/repos and with the default filesystem data store. Prior to Subversion 1.2, the default was Berkeley DB; the default is now FSFS. You can explicitly choose the filesystem type using the --fs-type argument, which accepts as a parameter either fsfs or bdb:

$ # Create an FSFS-backed repository
$ svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /var/svn/repos
$

# Create a Berkeley-DB-backed repository
$ svnadmin create --fs-type bdb /var/svn/repos
$

After running this simple command, you have a Subversion repository.

Tip

The path argument to svnadmin is just a regular filesystem path and not a URL such as the svn client program uses when referring to repositories. Both svnadmin and svnlook are considered server-side utilities—they are used on the machine where the repository resides ...