Subversion repository creation cheatsheet

Whenever I setup new SVN repositories, I always create a unix group for people who need read/write access to the repository. If the repository is named "tgh-public", then I choose to name the group as "svn-tgh-public".

I also generally designate a single user as the initial owner of the SVN repository folder under /var/svn. Alternately, you could just leave the repository owned by root.

# cd /var/svn
(your repositories may be stored elsewhere)
# /usr/sbin/groupadd svn-repositoryname
# svnadmin create /var/svn/repositoryname
# chmod -R 770 repositoryname
# chmod -R g+s repositoryname/db
# chown -R username:svn-repositoryname repositoryname
# /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G svn-repositoryname username

Notes:

• You'll want to repeat the "usermod" command for each person who will have access to the new repository.
  
• The chmod value of 770 means that anyone who is either the "username" or who belongs to the "svn-repositoryname" group will be able to access this repository via SVN+SSH and make changes.
  
• If you want to allow public reads, then you should use a chmod value of 774 which allows everyone read access to the folders.
  
• Forgetting to set the sticky bit for the group will result in a repository that breaks as different users edit the contents. If you dig through the contents of the FSFS directories, you'll see that files were created with ownership username:username instead of belonging to the group who is responsible for that repository.