Setting up svnserve as a service on RHEL5/CentOS system

If you've not already got a script for starting the service in /etc/init.d, create one, then add links in the relevant runlevel dirs.

The process is described at http://queens.db.toronto.edu/~nilesh/linux/subversion-howto/

The fastest way to get it going would be to add the startup command to /etc/rc.local/. This is run at the end of the system boot.

The "proper" way is to use the init system. There's a file called /etc/init.d/skeleton which is a basic framework for making an init script for starting a service. Copy it to /etc/init.d/svnserve and customise it as needed. There's also plenty of examples of svnserve init files on the web. Once /etc/init.d/svnserver [start|stop] works as expected, you can then run chkconfig svnserve on. This init script will be then be started on boot, and stopped on shutdown.

Supervisor may be the easiest way to do this. It's available in EPEL, a high-quality 3rd party repository of packages for RHEL/CentOS.

rpm -ivh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
yum install supervisor
chkconfig --levels 345 supervisor on

Edit /etc/supervisord.conf according the docs.

service start supervisor

To start svnserve at runlevel 3,4 and 5 try this :

chkconfig --level 345 svnserve on

To check if it's OK :

systemctl list-unit-files | grep *svn*

Note : before chkconfig you can check if service file already exists:

ls  /usr/lib/systemd/system/*svn*