Apache & Subversion mod_dav_svn configuration

First one should naturally install subversion and apache in to the system and while installing make sure that mod_dav option is enabled in apache package and that mod_dav_svn option is enabled in subversion.

There is two ways to setup the mod_dav_svn with apache depending on whether you plan to have one or multiple repositories within single URI. For single repository the you should add in to httpd.conf the following:

## SVN WebDAV Repository Setup
<Location /svn>
     DAV svn
     SVNPath /home/svn/repos
     SVNIndexXSLT "http://www.myservername.com/svnindex.xsl"
     
     # authenticating them valid ones
     Satisfy All
     Require valid-user
     AuthType Basic
     AuthName "Subversion Repositories"
     AuthUserFile /home/svn/access/users
</Location>

For multiple repositories add following in to httpd.conf:

## SVN WebDAV Repository Setup
<Location /svn>
     DAV svn
     SVNParentPath /home/svn/repos
     SVNIndexXSLT "http://www.myservername.com/svnindex.xsl"
     
     # authenticating them valid ones
     Satisfy All
     Require valid-user
     AuthType Basic
     AuthName "Subversion Repositories"
     AuthUserFile /home/svn/access/users
</Location>

The default svnindex.xsl and svnindex.css can be found and copied from the subversion source package under subversion-<VERSION-NUMBER>/tools/xslt/.

Create the users using the htpasswd utility when adding the first user add -c after the htpasswd command in order to create the password file and for the following users you should remove the -c option:

# htpasswd /home/svn/access/users <username>

Building repository in the single repository configuration. The repository needs to be writable by the user or group to which the apache process belongs to.

# svnadmin create /home/svn/repos
# svn import /home/<where_ever_you_have_initial_files> \
    file:///home/svn/repos -m "initial import"
# cd /home/svn
# chown -R www repos

Building repository in the multiple repository configuration. The repository needs to be writable by the user or group to which the apache process belongs to.

# svnadmin create /home/svn/repos/<PROJECT_NAME>
# svn import /home/<where_ever_you_have_initial_files> \ 
    file:///home/svn/repos/<PROJECT_NAME> -m "initial import"
# cd /home/svn/repos
# chown -R www <PROJECT_NAME>

In the single repository configuration you can access the repository through web browser simply by writing in to the location bar the http://www.myservername.com/svn, but in the multiple repository configuration you must also add the project name after e.g. http://www.myservername.com/svn/<PROJECT_NAME> simply accessing the parent directory will result in to permission denied page to displayed so listing of repositories is not possible.