Created:        2019-10-15 Tue
Last modified:  2022-03-26 Sat

How To Create Subversion Server with "svn+ssh" Access Method

This type of Subverision installation doesn't need running SVN server, but needs running SSH server instead. And it's typical for remote servers (EC2 for instance).

  1. Create EC2 instance (remote machine) w/ ssh access.

  2. For ease of use, create ssh configuration on local machine.

Host           <any custon name: 'svnrepo' for instance>
  HostName       <ec2 instance IP address>
  IdentityFile   <path to pem file>
  User           ubuntu

And connect to the remote machine.

$ ssh svnrepo

  1. Install subversion on the remote machine.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install subversion

  1. Create SVN repo on the remote machine (I created repository in the root dir for a shorter SVN URL path).

$ sudo svnadmin create /<repo dir name>
$ sudo chown -R ubuntu:ubuntu /<repo dir name>

  1. Checkout from newly created SVN repo on the local machine.

$ svn co svn+ssh://svnrepo/<repo dir name>

Tech details

Access methods

Version Control with Subversion describes the following methods

Schema

Access method

file:///

Direct repository access (on local disk)

http://

Access via WebDAV protocol to Subversion-aware Apache server

https://

Same as http://, but with SSL encapsulation (encryption and authentication)

svn://

Access via custom protocol to an svnserve server

svn+ssh://

Same as svn://, but through an SSH tunnel

svn+ssh

The important thing to understand here is that the Subversion client is not connecting to a running svnserve daemon. This method of access doesn't require a daemon, nor does it notice one if present. It relies wholly on the ability of ssh to spawn a temporary svnserve process, which then terminates when the network connection is closed.

—Version Control with Subversion