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Andrejs Cainikovs
Asked: 2009-08-25 16:04:13 +0800 CST

Subversion path differences for svn and svn+ssh

  • 772

[02:48][root@server:~] ps ax | grep svn 23986 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/bin/svnserve -d -r /srv/svn As you see from arguments my svn root dir is /srv/svn.

Now, some magic from remote machine...

This works:

> svn co svn://[email protected]/test-repo

But this not:

> svn co svn+ssh://svn-user@<putty-session-name>/test-repo
'No repository found in 'svn+ssh://svn-user@<putty-session-name>/test-repo'

Playing around for couple of hours I've found that appearantly if I use ssh tunnel, I'm able to get my repo using following:

> svn co svn+ssh://svn-user@<putty-session-name>/srv/svn/test-repo

...which means that I should specify full physical path to the repo. Huh?

svn ssh svnserve

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    As womble have said, indeed this is the 'feature' of svn over ssh.

    I had svn+ssh working without specifying the full path to repositories because the svn server had a svnserve wrapper script in place of original svnserve binary. Later, during subversion update this script was overwritten by the original binary.

    Solution:

    1. Rename svnserve to bin

      mv /usr/bin/svnserve /usr/bin/svnserve.bin

    2. Save this script as /usr/bin/svnserve:

      #!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/svnserve.bin -r /srv/svn "$@"

    3. Update permissions

      chmod 755 /usr/bin/svnserve
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  2. That's because svn over SSH (svn+ssh://) is just accessing a subversion repository "locally", using SSH as the transport, and hence you have access to the entire filesystem. Svnserve, in contrast, is told "start your paths with /srv/svn, and so you don't have to specify it manually.

    • 5

  3. You can edit the ssh login command for users using svn+ssh, by editing the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys of the subversion user. The line for a user will looks like :

    command="/usr/bin/svnserve -r /srv/svn [other svnserve options]" <key type> <user key> <key comment>

    There are more svn+ssh tricks in the svn book

    • 3

  4. this is more like a question by itself, but it is really related to this one.

    having set up svn+ssh with private/public keys i can't access my repo using relative paths in this way: 

    svn co svn+ssh://svn@SERVERIP/simple-webapp-svn simple-webapp-svn

    since i am getting this error: 

    svn: URL 'svn+ssh://svn@SERVERIP/simple-webapp-svn' doesn't exist

    but only like that: 

    svn co svn+ssh://svn@SERVERIP/home/svn/projects/simple-webapp-svn simple-webapp-svn

    This is the authorized_keys2 file i have inside /home/svn/.ssh directory

    $ sudo cat /home/svn/.ssh/authorized_keys2
command="/usr/bin/svnserve.bin -t --tunnel-user=USERNAME",no-port-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty ssh-rsa [rsa-key] [user-note]

    and the svnserve.bin file suggested by Andrejs at previous answer

    $ cat  /usr/bin/svnserve.bin 
#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/svnserve -r /home/svn/projects "$@"

    I even thought about permission issues, that are listed here: 

    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 63684 2009-12-12 06:45 /usr/bin/svnserve
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    61 2010-08-25 17:19 /usr/bin/svnserve.bin

    I really can't come up with a solution...

    • 0