After many grueling hours trying to get Subversion working on my Leopard Server, I think I’ve finally figured out the best way to do it-at least it works well for me. There were initially some problems with several of the approaches I took, mainly based off of several articles. The two I revisited most are below:

• Agile Shrugged
• I-Graph

Using these two articles and lots of trial and error, I was able to get subversion up and running. But I did run into several problems.

Just this afternoon a fellow developer asked, “Did you turn off Subversion or delete our repository?”. I of course, replied with something similar to “Shit, what’s wrong with it now?!” Turns out, Leopard Server rewrote my additions to the site’s configuration file. Thanks again, Server Admin! Where I had entered:

DAV svn
SVNParentPath /path/to/svn/repo

Server Admin replaced it with:

DAV off
SVNParentPath /path/to/svn/repo

So, I took some time, read over the two articles again, and realized that I would have to combine the perks of each one to achieve the following.

Agile Shrugged makes a good point that configuring the httpd.conf manually fails to take advantage of Open Directory’s group management. I-Graph does it this way, so I figure combining the two would be best for my situation.

So here goes, how I setup Subversion on Leopard Server, while keeping it from rewriting my conf files.

Include the section in a separate file, outside of /etc/apache2/sites/. This will keep Server Admin from rewriting that portion. I put mine in /etc/apache2/other/svn.conf.

<location>
  DAV svn
  SVNParentPath /path/to/svn
  AuthType Basic
  AuthName "SVN Repository"
  Require group dev
</location>

So then in my site config file, I simply included the other/svn.conf. I have yet to be sure that this will keep Leopard from rewriting my DAV svn bit, but the test I’ve run confirm it.

Include /etc/apache2/other/svn.conf

That did it for me. I hope this helps some of you.

More information:

• Ocean Informatics
• SVN Book