Version Control with Subversion, 2nd Edition

svnserve, a Custom Server

The svnserve program is a lightweight server, capable of speaking to clients over TCP/IP using a custom, stateful protocol. Clients contact an svnserve server by using URLs that begin with the svn:// or svn+ssh:// scheme. This section will explain the different ways of running svnserve, how clients authenticate themselves to the server, and how to configure appropriate access control to your repositories.

Invoking the Server

There are a few different ways to run the svnserve program:

• Run svnserve as a standalone daemon, listening for requests.

• Have the Unix inetd daemon temporarily spawn svnserve whenever a request comes in on a certain port.

• Have SSH invoke a temporary svnserve over an encrypted tunnel.

• Run svnserve as a Microsoft Windows service.

svnserve as daemon

The easiest option is to run svnserve as a standalone “daemon” process. Use the -d option for this:

$ svnserve -d
$               # svnserve is now running, listening on port 3690

When running svnserve in daemon mode, you can use the --listen-port and --listen-host options to customize the exact port and hostname to “bind” to.

Once we successfully start svnserve as explained previously, it makes every repository on your system available to the network. A client needs to specify an absolute path in the repository URL. For example, if a repository is located at /var/svn/project1, a client would reach it via svn://host.example.com/var/svn/project1. To increase security, you can pass the -r option to svnserve, which restricts ...