Server Configuration

•a script wants to authenticate without using cached credentials.

Here is a final summary that describes how a Subversion client behaves when it receives an authentication challenge:

1.Check whether the user specified any credentials as command-line options, via --username and/or - -password. If not, or if these options fail to authenticate successfully, then

2.Look up the server's realm in the runtime auth/ area, to see if the user already has the appropriate credentials cached. If not, or if the cached credentials fail to authenticate, then

3.Resort to prompting the user.

If the client successfully authenticates by any of the methods listed above, it will attempt to cache the credentials on disk (unless the user has disabled this behavior, as mentioned earlier.)

svnserve, a custom server

The svnserve program is a lightweight server, capable of speaking to clients over TCP/IP using a custom, stateful protocol. Clients contact an svnserve server by using URLs that begin with the svn:// or svn+ssh:// schema. This section will explain the different ways of running svnserve, how clients authenticate themselves to the server, and how to configure appropriate access control to your repositories.

Invoking the Server

There are a few different ways to invoke the svnserve program. If invoked with no options, you'll see nothing but a help message. However, if you're planning to have inetd launch the process, then you can pass the -i (--inetd) option:

$ svnserve -i

( success ( 1 2 ( ANONYMOUS ) ( edit-pipeline ) ) )

When invoked with the --inetd option, svnserve attempts to speak with a Subversion client via stdin and stdout using a custom protocol. This is the standard behavior for a program being run via inetd. The IANA has reserved port 3690 for the Subversion protocol, so on a Unix-like system you can add lines to /etc/services like these (if they don't already exist):

And if your system is using a classic Unix-like inetd daemon, you can add this line to /etc/inetd.conf:

svn stream tcp nowait svnowner /usr/bin/svnserve svnserve -i

Make sure “svnowner” is a user which has appropriate permissions to access your repositories. Now, when a client connection comes into your server on port 3690, inetd will spawn an svnserve process to service it.

On a Windows system, third-party tools exist to run svnserve as a service. Look on Subversion's website for a list of these tools.

96