December 02, 2005

Using SVNServe on a Win2K3 Box

As I made obvious in my "Top Five(5) Reasons Darcs Kicks A$$" post from a while back, I have become quite fond of darcs as a revision control system. As of late I have been learning more about the monotone project and am REALLY diggin' what I am seeing(note: while the name is obviously similar, as far as I know there is no direct connection between monotone and Novells/Ximian's Mono project nor is the project built on top of any runtime implementation of the CLI (from what I understand it's built using Lua.)

But with as much potential as I think both of these projects have, beyond CVS, Subversion, its successor, is by far and beyond the most likely revision control system to be installed on a developers workstation and given its CVS roots its usage is more likely to be understood by this same group.

With this in mind it seems to make a lot of sense to make SVN the primary project source control system for projects which have a broad scope of potential users. I am working on just such a project in my spare time and have recently been wrestling with getting the combination of Win2K3 + Cygwin + SVNServe working well together. While there is very nice little SVN Service wrapper for Windows-based systems, if you are running Cygwin and plan to use the instance of Subversion that is prepackaged and ready to be installed as part of the Cygwin setup process, while there may be a way to get the two(SVN Service wrapper and Cygwin Subversion instance) to play well with each other, I couldn't figure out how.

One of the MANY nice features of Cygwin is the ability to install a Cygwin executable(such as svnserve.exe) as a Windows service using cygrunsrv.exe as a proxy to communicate between Windows and Cygwin. I found a nice reference that helped quite a bit. But if you want to take advantage of the Unix/Linux-styled directory structure and reference syntax (e.g. /srv/www/htdocs) coupled with OpenSSH(another tutorial that I need to write to help the rest of you from wanting to pull out your hair if dealing with installing Cygwin + OpenSSH or any of the various OpenSSH/Cygwin-mini installations that are available) intalled on an Internet-based server as opposed to your companies Intranet then there are some modifications to the above linked reference that need to be made to make things work. Please note: you will need to replace all entries contained in square brackets, e.g. [servername], with the proper information for your own installation minus the square brackets. Also, this is pretty much a straight copy-and-paste from the above linked reference with the proper modifications to get this to work as outlined above.

Use cygrunsrv to install svnserve.exe as a service
I ran this from a cygwin shell window
cygrunsrv \
--install SvnServe \
--chdir [C:\\cygwin\\srv\\repository\\svn\\reponame] \
--path [C:\\cygwin\\bin\\svnserve.exe] \
--args "--foreground --daemon --root=[/srv/repository/svn/reponame] --listen-host [nameofhost.com]" \
--desc "Subversion for [whatever you want to call this instance]" \
--neverexits

Run the Services app and manually start SvnServe the first time.
It should be set to autostart in the future.

From another workstation I ran this to see that the service
was running.

svn list svn://[ServerName.com]/

Hope you find this information helpful!