TortoiseSVN Error: Unable to Connect to a repository at URL

Question

I'm using TortoiseSVN to connect to a newly-created repository on my RHEL server. I did svnadmin create reponame as root to create the repository. I simply want to checkout the repository using TortoiseSVN so that I can add files to it.

I installed mod_dav_svn and can now connect and checkout the repository. On my local machine, I added files to the directory and tried to commit. However, TortoiseSVN now gives

Can't open file '/subversion/langantiques/db/txn-current-lock': Permission
denied

How do I rectify this one?

Solution 1

If you created repo as root (with with umask, BTW) and later try to access repo with W action as local user with file:/// protocol (all mentioned parts in sentence are important) you have ordinary permission problem: user, under which you run svn process, have to have sufficient rights to work with repo. Chown or chmod or chgrp repo dir, as needed (I'm not a shaman to see your FS)

If your repo served by Apache - httpd process must have +r+w rights on repo

Solution 2

You'll need something to serve the repository to remote nodes. There are three main options;

1. svnserve

   This is a simple service that runs on port 3690 that allows access to your repository. It's pretty basic; it can enforce permissions settings but has no encryption for its network traffic (including passwords). You'd run the service (which is probably installed already on your server) and then run the checkout with an svn:// URL.

2. WebDAV

   This option requires a web server - probably Apache, with the mod_dav_svn module. You can configure security (authentication and encryption) in the web server, as well as access controls; this is probably the most flexible of the options for this reason. You'd use an http:// or https:// URL to check this out.

3. SSH

   This option uses the SSH setup that you've probably already got configured; in this way it gets good authentication and encryption. But, since it's using the linux users, you'll need to jump through some hoops to lock down any user that you want to have SVN access but not shell access. This also requires some wrangling to get the SSH connectivity working - last time I messed with it it involved feeding tortoise the plink.exe file from PuTTY. You'd access this with an svn+ssh:// URL.

Comments

[SidC]

Mod_dav_svn is installed.

[ravi yarlagadda]

Then can you provide the Apache configuration?

[SidC]

Sounds like this is my issue. Would chmod 765 /subversion suffice?

[Lazy Badger]

@SidC - as usual, "It depends". I don't know, which user do you use for access, which groups include this user. For multi-user environment (svn:// or svn+ssh://) I prefer join users in group and operate at group-permissions level. Can't say exact value, but 5 for "other" seems as extra-soft limitation

[SidC]

I did chmod 777 /subversion and chown -R svnuser /subversion The issue still persists. How do I ensure that httpd process has r+w rights?

[SidC]

I also tried chown -R www-data /subversion/* but received Invalid User. Is www-data named something else in RHEL?

[Lazy Badger]

I don't know all distros. Try to find httpd-owner in /etc/ files (passwd and later groups?)

[SidC]

I was able to resolve this by doing chown -R apache /subversion/* which gives httpd/Apache the ability to own the subversion directory instead of root. I did a checkout to local file system, extracted contents of compressed file and added them successfully.