Serverless SVN Repositories

A little known fact about Subversion is that you don’t need a special server to get running. You can actually host Subversion repositories locally on your own computer, or on any remote machine you’ve got SSH access into.

Localhosting

You can easily create a local repository on your machine with the svnadmin command. To set up a repository in my home directory, I’d just drop to the command line, and type:

svnadmin create ~/new_repository

That would create the new_repository directory under my home, and initialize it for use as an SVN repository. From there, you can reference it via the file protocol, and use it just like any other repository:

svn import ./my_project file:///Users/mwest/new_repository

Easy!

Remotehosting

If you don’t have a dedicated SVN server, or a decent web host, you can gain some of the advantages of a remote repository by creating a local repository, and then uploading it to a server where you have SSH access. This trick works wonderfully on services like Strongspace where you have nothing more than SSH access, with no opportunity to log in and run svnadmin.

To set up a repository on such a server, I’d create it locally, just like before:

svnadmin create ~/temp

Instead of using it locally with the file:/// protocol, we’ll upload it to our remote server using scp (or whatever file transfer mechanism makes sense to you):

scp -r ~/temp me@my.server.com:/path/to/repository

Now, the initialized repository is up waiting for us on the remote server. We can’t use the file protocol to get to it anymore, since it isn’t part of our local filesystem. Instead, there’s a special protocol for using SVN over an SSH connection: svn+ssh. To run the same import command from above on the remote server, we’d type:

svn import ./my_project svn+ssh://me@my.server.com/path/to/repository

And there you go. Easy, straightforward SVN access without any server setup whatsoever.

You lose a little bit of functionality, and it feels a little duct-taped together, but it’s a great first-step into the world of SVN, and you can easily migrate to a “real” SVN server when you’re ready to use the additional features that enables.

Resources

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