Setting up Subversion with multiple access methods

One thing that makes subversion such a powerful revision system is it’s ability to permit multiple methods of access. Https, WebDAV, SSH and svnserve. In spite of svn’s ability to support multiple access methods, doing so simultaniously can be quite challenging. Typically one will run into permission issues as the http(s) access will all be written to the filesystem as the user running the webserver. The SSH access will all write to the filesystem under each users given account.

Here is one approach to permit both.

1. Place all your ssh+svn users into the webserver group (often www).
2. Make all the desired respositories owned by that group.
3. Change the group permissions to rw
4. If using svnserve: The users need a sane umask for accessing the repository. Make sure the svnserve executible (commonly found at /usr/bin/svnserve) is a wrapper script that runs umask 002 and executes the real svnserve binary.

The necessary commands could look like this

# cd /var/svn/repos
# chown -R wwwrun:www .
# chmod -R g+rw .

Paths and groups would need to be adjusted for your system.