How to Install WebSVN for Subversion on CentOS

In this post, i will guide you on how to set up the WebSVN in your subversion repository. WebSVN will enable you to view your subversion repositories with default useful features as below:-

• Blame (annotation) view of file authorship
• Comparing revisions of files / directories
• Revision and log message browsing / searching
• RSS feed support for watching any resource

In order to enable other features such as path-based restriction of privileges, proper customization of config.php code is needed. At the time of this article wrote, the current release of WebSVN is WebSVN Release 2.3.2.

Prerequisite :
1. How to Install Apache Httpd Web Server on Linux
2. How to Install Subversion on CentOS 5.5 Server

Steps to install WebSVN :
1. Download the WebSVN Release 2.3.2
You can wget as below. Make sure that you put it or move it to your repository directory.

[root@server repos]# pwd
/svn/repos
[root@server repos]# http://websvn.tigris.org/files/documents/1380/48737/websvn-2.3.2.tar.gz
-bash: http://websvn.tigris.org/files/documents/1380/48737/websvn-2.3.2.tar.gz: No such file or directory
[root@server repos]# clear
[root@server repos]# pwd
/svn/repos
[root@server repos]# wget http://websvn.tigris.org/files/documents/1380/48737/websvn-2.3.2.tar.gz
--2011-04-03 17:53:20--  http://websvn.tigris.org/files/documents/1380/48737/websvn-2.3.2.tar.gz
Resolving websvn.tigris.org... 204.16.104.146
Connecting to websvn.tigris.org|204.16.104.146|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 846511 (827K) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: `websvn-2.3.2.tar.gz'

100%[===========================================>] 846,511     72.9K/s   in 31s

2011-04-03 17:53:53 (26.5 KB/s) - `websvn-2.3.2.tar.gz' saved [846511/846511]

2. Extract and unzip the websvn-2.3.2.tar.gz using below command and rename it as websvn for easy browsing URL as below:
http://servername/websvn/

[root@server repos]# tar xvfz websvn-2.3.2.tar.gz
[root@server repos]# mv websvn-2.3.2 websvn

3. Go to websvn/include directory. Make a copy of distconfig.php and name it as config.php. config.php will be the main configuration file of your WebSVN.

[root@server repos]# cd websvn/include
[root@server include]# ls
accessfile.php  command.php      diff_util.php   setup.php     utils.php
auth.php        configclass.php  distconfig.php  svnlook.php   version.php
bugtraq.php     diff_inc.php     header          template.php
[root@server include]# cp distconfig.php config.php

4. Edit the config.php file. Then uncomment line 106 and modify the parentPath as below:

[root@server include]# vi config.php
106 // $config->parentPath('Path/to/parent (e.g. c:\\svn)');

Change to :

106 $config->parentPath('/svn/repos');

5. Save the config.php then test your http://servername/websvn. If everything properly configured, you should see the page that lists your repositories.