SVN+Apache: Where to store repositories

Question

I have been keeping all my Subversion repositories on my local computer for a while, but now I decided to move them to my web hosting server. It's an apache server and the hosting company has set up svn. My question is, where should I store my svn repositories. I originally stored them in the public_html/ directory, but (I'm certainly no security expert) I think only publicly available web content should be stored there. On the other hand, if I try storing the repositories in ~/var/svn/ then my subversion client (Eclipse) says "no element found". How do other people store their repositories with regards to Apache? Thank you.

Answer 1

You can select any physical location for your repositories collection, because logical path is defined inside Apache (Location container + SVNPath|SVNParentPath) later. You have only

• select big partition (repository may require a lot of space)
• don't forget chown|chmod repo dirs, in order to give Apache process the ability to handle files of repository

/var (/var/repos/) is good candidate for repo-root

Answer 2

Typically, you would store data in an appropriate subdirectory of /var (not ~/var ), that is if you have access to it. Eg /var/svn

Answer 3

We haven't adopted SVN for our web source yet, but have been using CVS. Our solution was to simply prevent Apache from serving the CVS store using IndexIgnore

IndexIgnore .??* *~ *# HEADER* README* RCS CVS *,v *,t

You may be able to do something similar, using something based upon .svn .

Answer 4

It will be difficult if you are using a shared web hosting, because you need to have an access to root, to create svn-group and creating the structure of the repository. You also need to install some module on Apache like dav_svn. You will need to create a VirtualHost (sites-available) in order to serve your repos over a specific DNS.

There is a lot of tutorial on the inter-webs -> http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-subversion-svn-with-apache2-and-dav/ (for ubuntu)

Me, I rent a Virtual Private Server to host my SVN.