Subversion on Ubuntu – Multiple Repositories

Eighteen months have passed since I setup Subversion on Ubuntu and I’ve found multiple repositories are valuable for providing finer grained access control and easier storage management. Here is a revised incantation:

su -
adduser --system --home /srv/svnrepos --gecos "System account to run svnserve" svn
apt-get install subversion xinetd
cat >> /etc/xinetd.d/svn << "EOF"
service svn
{
        port                    = 3690
        socket_type             = stream
        protocol                = tcp
        wait                    = no
        user                    = svn
        server                  = /usr/bin/svnserve
        server_args             = -i -r /srv/svnrepos
}
EOF
/etc/init.d/xinetd restart

# for each repository, eg. myrepo1
$repo=myrepo1
svnadmin create /srv/svnrepos/$repo
chown -R svn:nogroup /srv/svnrepos

# uncomment line to use default password file
vi ~svn/$repo/conf/svnserve.conf

cat >> ~svn/$repo/conf/passwd << "EOF"
[users]
fred = *****
...