How to Setup a Hosted SVN Server on the Cheap

Have it all, with benefits including: reliability, performance and a solid backup solution. Learn how you can setup a hosted Subversion server for your team in minutes … oh, and did I mention its pretty cheap too!

This guide will cover, from start to finish, how to setup you very own hosted Subversion (SVN) server with a full backup solution.

The background:

I’ve been using Subversion for about 2 years now. I started using it myself for my own projects and intoduced it to Hitch about a year ago. My original setup was a small sized Windows XP desktop machine using a simple svnserve setup. The machine was on a remote Comcast Cable connection (cable connections typically cap your UP speed so things can get pretty slow). And, because half of our team at Hitch was using the server, performance and speed was becoming an issue.

Often times the cable connection would go down, or the server needed rebooting. Additionally data backups were sketchy.

Setting up an SVN server is not difficult, and some of you probably have one running already. The setup I am going to go over will use a default Rackspace Could Server instance and uses the svnserve deamon (basic SVN at its best).

Getting started with Rackspace Could Server

Rackspace has some great pricing for their Could Servers. For this setup all I needed was the entry level server at 256MB/10GB @ 1.5c/hr (roughly $11 monthly). There are also bandwidth in/out and backup storage costs which are negligible.

All and all the server costs less than $15 a month to operate, yet it comes with the key benefits of reliability (up-time), performance (very nice up/down speeds) and a solid backup solution. Creating an account is easy and I totally recommend using Rackspace.

Creating the Server

1. After creating your account with Rackspace, login.
2. Click on “Hosting” from the options on the left, then select “Cloud Servers”.
3. Click the “Add Server” button.
4. You can select your desired Operating System (OS), for this guide I’ve selected Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS – hardy heron (Subversion on Linux is easy and the Ubuntu community has great support).
5. You will be prompted to give your new server a name and select a size (256MB/10GB should be more than enough for a basic setup), click the “Create Server” button.
6. The server will take a few minutes to spin up. You will be presented with server information and you will also recieve an email with all the details. Make a note of the IP address and your root password (you will use it later to login via SSH, to configure the server).

Setting Up Scheduled Image Backups

1. Now select the “Images” tab and click the “Enable Scheduled Imaging” button.
2. Select a time for the daily backup (0000-0200) and a day for the weekly backup (Saturday). Click the “Save Schedule” button.

Rackspace has two locations where the backup images are stored:

• With Server: Images located with the server will be deleted if you destroy their parent server.
• Cloud Files: Images located in Cloud Files will remain there even after deleting their parent server.

By default your backups will be stored “With Server”, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since your server instance is pretty resilient.

To enable Cloud Files storage, I had to make a request to Rackspace via a support ticket, Rackspace was quick to respond and in about an hour I was all setup.

Moving backups to Cloud Files is as easy as cliking a “move” link. The only annoyance is that Rackspace doesn’t appear to have a way to move backup images into Cloud Files storage automatically on a schedule.

However, Cloud Files does have an API which can probably be used via a cron script to move a “With Server” backup image to a Cloud Files storage container (I have not tested this and am making an assumption that this should be possible).

Configuring the Server with Subversion

Well it’s time to get to the nitty-gritty… You will need an SSH client for this (I’m using PuTTY).

1. Open PuTTY, enter in your server’s IP address and use port 22 (SSH), then click the “Open” button.
2. PuTTY will prompt you to cache your connection, so click the “Yes” button.
3. Login as root, use the root password you were given during setup (check your email, it’s there too).

Once you’ve started your SSH session, you will execute a series of commands and make some file edits to get your server all setup.

First lets get the server up-to-date with the most recent packages.

# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get upgrade

Next lets install subversion and xinetd (which we will use to manage connections to svnserve).

# apt-get install subversion subversion-tools xinetd

Now we will create a default repos directory where we can store all our subversion repositories. We will also create our first repository. You can change myrepo to a different name if you want.

# mkdir /repos
# svnadmin create /repos/myrepo

There are a few strategies for managing the structure inside a repository, but that’s beyond the scope of this tutorial. The approach I use and am recommending is the following:

/myrepo

/myrepo/project-a
/myrepo/project-a/trunk
/myrepo/project-a/tags
/myrepo/project-a/branches

/myrepo/project-b
/myrepo/project-b/trunk
/myrepo/project-b/tags
/myrepo/project-b/branches

It’s one repository for all your projects. I’ve been using this structure very successfully, additionally this setup makes it easy to cherry-pick bigger projects and put them in their own repository in the future (you will probably never need to do this).

Back to the setup; We will be using a little bit of vim (a super fly Linux text editor) to do a bit of config file editing, so here is a quick primer on using vim:

Open files with the following command:

# vim /path/to/the/file

Once you’ve opened a file, enter editing mode by pressing i. You will now be able to make changes to the file.

Use the directional arrows on your keyboard to navigate.

When you are finished editing press ESC, this will exit the editing mode. To save the file enter :wq (write and quit).

If you want to exit without saving, enter :q!

Now, lets add a user for our repository, open the repository’s passwd file:

# cd /repos/myrepo/conf
# vim passwd

Using your vim skills, and the examples in the file, add the following to the end of the file, and then save it:

myusername = mypassword

Now lets set the user with read/write access to the entire repository, open the repository’s authz file:

# vim authz

Add the following to the end of file, then save it:

[/]
myusername = rw

Finally we need to adjust the config file, open the repository’s svnserve.conf file:

# vim svnserve.conf

Edit it so it looks like this:

### This file controls the configuration of the svnserve daemon, if you
### use it to allow access to this repository.  (If you only allow
### access through http: and/or file: URLs, then this file is
### irrelevant.)

### Visit http://subversion.tigris.org/ for more information.

[general]
### These options control access to the repository for unauthenticated
### and authenticated users.  Valid values are "write", "read",
### and "none".  The sample settings below are the defaults.
anon-access = none
auth-access = write
### The password-db option controls the location of the password
### database file.  Unless you specify a path starting with a /,
### the file's location is relative to the conf directory.
### Uncomment the line below to use the default password file.
password-db = passwd
### The authz-db option controls the location of the authorization
### rules for path-based access control.  Unless you specify a path
### starting with a /, the file's location is relative to the conf
### directory.  If you don't specify an authz-db, no path-based access
### control is done.
### Uncomment the line below to use the default authorization file.
authz-db = authz
### This option specifies the authentication realm of the repository.
### If two repositories have the same authentication realm, they should
### have the same password database, and vice versa.  The default realm
### is repository's uuid.
realm = My First Repository

Almost done, now we will configure xinetd to manage connections to the svn server. We will need to create a new config file for xinetd:

# vim /etc/xinetd.d/svnserve

Add the following to this file:

service svn
{
    port = 3690
    socket_type = stream
    protocol = tcp
    wait = no
    user = root
    server = /usr/bin/svnserve
    server_args = -i -r /repos
}

Save the file and exit. Now restart the xinetd daemon.

# /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Thats it!

Checkout Your Repository

At this point your server should be all set, it’s now time for you to do a checkout of your new repository.

Most of my day-to-day development is done on a windows environment, so I use TortiseSVN as my client. Gaird @ Hitch Creative is a Mac user and he uses Versions.

Using your SVN client of choice, do a checkout of your repository at:

svn://[SERVER_IP_ADDRESS]/myrepo