One of the things that annoyed me with the process of setting up a Subversion server with SSH access, aside from the sheer complexity, was the number of steps required just to create a new project. Once was bad enoug, but repeating those steps each time to create a project just didn’t scale…

So, a bit of Bash scripting later and everything is much, much easier.

Assumptions

The instructions and script that follow assume you completed the earlier tutorial carefully when setting up your own Subversion server. It may not be appropriate or work as expected otherwise. As always, YMMV.

Creating, Configuring and Using the Script

Somewhere in your $PATH on the system acting as your Subversion server (I suggest /usr/local/bin), create a new file named svnproj, set the file as executable and then finally open the file for editing.

cd /usr/local/bin

sudo touch svnproj
sudo chmod 755 svnproj
sudo pico svnproj

Copy the contents below into the svnproj script.

#!/bin/sh

REPOSITORY="/svn"     # Set to your repository path
USER="admin_user"     # Set to your system admin user

# ====================================================
# Do not change anything below the line above

PROJECT_NAME="$1"

if [ $# -eq 0 ] ; then
  echo "Usage: newproj PROJECT_NAME"
  exit
fi

echo "------------------------------------------------"
cd ${REPOSITORY}
svnadmin create ${PROJECT_NAME}

echo "Created project: '$PROJECT_NAME'"
echo "Configuring svnserver.conf for restricted access"

cp ${REPOSITORY}/${PROJECT_NAME}/conf/svnserve.conf \
${REPOSITORY}/${PROJECT_NAME}/conf/svnserve.conf.default
cat > ${REPOSITORY}/$PROJECT_NAME/conf/svnserve.conf << "EOF"
[general]
anon-access = read
auth-access = write

[realm]
realm = Projects
EOF

echo "Successfully set svnserve.conf"

chown -R ${USER} ${REPOSITORY}/$PROJECT_NAME
chmod -R 770 ${REPOSITORY}/$PROJECT_NAME
chmod g+t ${REPOSITORY}/$PROJECT_NAME/db
  
echo "------------------------------------------------"
echo "Done"

The script requires you to set two internal variables in order for it to actually work; one which sets the location of your repository, and a second which sets the admin username on your system which will be the default owner of files and folders in the repository. You can find these at the top of the script, named REPOSITORY and USER respectively.

Running the script is as simple as:

sudo svnproj PROJECT_NAME

If you happen to run the script without the PROJECT_NAME parameter, it will simply output the usage note and exit gracefully. Whether you need run the script via sudo ultimately depends on where your repository is located on your server.

Our particular version of this script does one additional thing — it creates a post-commit hook script and automatically inserts the necessary code to output commit messages as an RSS feed per these instructions.

As always, happy versioning!