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September 23, 2020

AWS Subversion Setup Guide

Update: For some reason I started getting charged for this setup, not sure why and didn't want to dig into it as I no longer needed it.

My subversion provider shut down this year and I was struggling to find a new one. These are the setup steps I eventually discovered that allowed me to setup subversion on AWS (for free) as of September 2020.


Launching an AWS Instance

• Sign up for AWS, login and go to EC2.
• Create a key pair. Instructions
• Launch an instance of Amazon Linux AMI (not Amazon Linux 2 AMI).

I think you can set the storage space to 30GB and not be charged but I couldn't find an official wording anywhere and it may have changed.

Setup SSL, HTTP, and HTTPS access.



Connect and Setup Subversion

• Download putty and connect. Instructions
• Update and setup subversion with the following commands.
sudo yum update -y
sudo yum –y install mod_dav_svn
sudo yum –y install subversion
• Edit the subversion config file (/etc/httpd/conf.d/subversion.conf) so it contains the below text

(I used vi to edit with sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/subversion.conf).

LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so
<Location /repos>
    DAV svn
    SVNParentPath /var/www/svn
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Authorization Realm"
    AuthUserFile /var/www/svn/passwd
    AuthzSVNAccessFile /var/www/svn/access
    Require valid-user
</Location>
• Make a folder for repositories.
sudo mkdir /var/www/svn
• Make an access file, the section header for all repositories is [/] but I want to be able to control user access on my repositories per user so I split my repositories up (KCBuild and KCSource are the repository names).

(I used vi to edit with sudo vi /var/www/access).

[KCBuild:/]
ian = rw
sam = rw
pete = rw
[KCSource:/]
ian = rw
sam = rw
pete = rw
• Setup a password file. The c is only used the first time to create the file.
sudo htpasswd -cb /var/www/svn/passwd ian PASSWORD
sudo htpasswd -b /var/www/svn/passwd sam PASSWORD
sudo htpasswd -b /var/www/svn/passwd pete PASSWORD
• Create a repository. (For me REPONAME was KCBuild and again for KCSource).
cd /var/www/svn
sudo svnadmin create REPONAME
• Give permissions to the server to make changes, you need to rerun this if you add new repositories.
sudo chown -R apache.apache /var/www/svn
sudo chmod 600 /var/www/svn/access /var/www/svn/passwd
• Make sure the server stays up if you restart.
sudo chkconfig httpd on
sudo chkconfig --list

Should show 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on for httpd

• Restart the server (you may need to do this whenever you make changes to the setup).
sudo service httpd restart

Now you can use an SVN client to connect to your repository with the url http://URL-FROM-AWS/repos/REPONAME


Optional - Transfer an Existing Repository

I also wanted to transfer my existing subversion repository history so I used svnrdump to dump and then load the repository.

•To get this to work you need to make a pre-revprop-change hook for each repository
cd /var/www/svn/REPONAME/hooks
sudo cp pre-revprop-change.tmpl pre-revprop-change
sudo vi pre-revprop-change

add a line at the top "exit 0"

•Make dump files from the old repository.
svnrdump dump --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD OLD_REPOSITORY_URL > C:\SvnBackup.dump

If that hangs you can do it in parts changing the rev numbers each time and making sure to use the --incremental tag on subsequent calls.

svnrdump dump --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD --revision 1:100 OLD_REPOSITORY_URL > C:\SvnBackup1.dump
svnrdump dump --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD --revision 101:200 --incremental OLD_REPOSITORY_URL > C:\SvnBackup2.dump
svnrdump dump --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD --revision 201:300 --incremental OLD_REPOSITORY_URL > C:\SvnBackup3.dump
svnrdump dump --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD --revision 300:HEAD --incremental OLD_REPOSITORY_URL > C:\SvnBackup4.dump
•Load the file (or each file in order if you have multiple).
svnrdump load --username USERNAME --password PASSWORD NEW_REPOSITORY_URL < C:\SvnBackup.dump



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