Hi I'm investigating subversion at home, and my company is planning on migrating from cvs to subversion. I was wondering if there are any standard or recommended locations to put the subversion repository. Obviously you can put it anywhere, and I'm sure there are people who put it in different places for different reasons. But I'm sure there are a few standard spots that have reason for why they are there in the filesystem hierarchy.

The cvs manual seems to suggest /usr/local/cvsroot. I guess I could make a /usr/src/svnrepos. The subversion manual doesn't seem to get into setting up the repository location or give suggested locations.

In my home install I decided /var/svnrepos. (I'm using FC5 btw) I guess because a repository seems like variable data. Though after creating the repo, I can't add a project as user. I'm guessing I need to modify owner or group of the subversion repository directory and its subdirectories. For now I would like it so a group of admins could add projects and programmers could of course checkout, checkin and add new sources within an existing project.

Eventually I would like to setup remote access, and restricting certain projects to certain developers but I can do more research into those, and there appears to be more documentation on setting up remote access.

Cheers

i personally use /var/svn or /var/lib/svn and create repositories in there

the reason for this is that the purpose of /var is for 'variable' data
whereas /usr if for 'user' data (hence /usr/local/bin for 'user appliactions')

if you check where other databases (subversion server uses berkleydb) have their root (mysql pgsql apt or yum) then you can follow that structure.

if you get into kernel compiling, you will also read that /urs/src is where you have software sources to compile (also kernel sources are installed here if you install using a package) - i don't think it would be the place for a databse.

Thanks Nathanael,
I agree that the var partition makes more sense. It seems most other databases exist in /var/lib even though I wouldn't really clasify db's as state information. There is a /var/db folder but doesn't seem to be used by much and it isn't even part of the FSH standard.

Any advice on the repository file permission stuff. I think I'll just try creating a group svnadmin and changing the directory group, as well as giving write permission to the group.

premissions depend on how you want to serve your repositories - if you want to use web_dev your webserver (most likley apache2) will require read and write premissions to your repositories.
if you want to use svnserve you can setup a new user and group, but make sure svnserv runs as that user!

I've been researching this pretty recently myself and got mine up just last week for "home files". I would say about 40% of web sites show the subversion directory in /home, such as:
/home/svn or /home/subversion.

The funny thing is I only have one problem I cannot figure out, and that's how to have the web browser show all the available repositories in that directory. I can see the individual respositories, but not the list of all of them with the security I'm using.

Here's my subversion file in my "debian" /etc/apache2/sites-available directory. I set up both digest authentication, ssl, and an authorization file. I can't tell what the "Satisfy Any" does.

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:443 192.168.1.87:443>
ServerAdmin myemail
ServerName odin
# SSL activation
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem

DocumentRoot /home/subversion
<Directory /home/subversion>
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

#<LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
Require valid-user
#</LimitExcept>
</Directory>

# Note Alias goes to our DocumentRoot.
#Alias /webdav /home/subversion

# Log level and error log file location
# ErrorLog /var/log/Apache2/error.log
# LogLevel warn
#CustomLog /var/log/Apache2/access.log combined

<Location /svn>

# Uncomment this to enable the repository,
DAV svn

# Set this to the path to your repository
# SVNPath /var/lib/svn
SVNParentPath /home/subversion
SVNListParentPath on

AuthType Digest
AuthName "peters"
AuthDigestFile /etc/apache2/svn-admin/digest-password
SSLRequireSSL
# Uncomment the following line to enable Authz Authentication
AuthzSVNAccessFile /etc/apache2/auth-files/public-svn-authzfile
# SVNAutoVersioning On
# The following three lines allow anonymous read, but make
# committers authenticate themselves.
Satisfy Any
#<LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
Require valid-user
#</LimitExcept>

</Location>

</VirtualHost>


I hope this helps,
Kurt