Subversion according to how-to, got stuck

I’m following this how-to:
Setting up a Subversion server using Apache2 - openSUSE

and everything went well till this part:

 (su) svnadmin create /srv/svn/kdrepos/meddaliadur
 (su) chown -R wwwrun:www /srv/svn/kdrepos/meddaliadur/{dav,db,locks}

The commands I used so far are:

Bakhuis@Bakhuis-Server:~> su
Password:                   
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # a2enmod dav
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # a2enmod dav_svn
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # mkdir /srv/svn/user_access
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # touch /srv/svn/user_access/svn_passwdfile
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # chown root:www /srv/svn/user_access/svn_passwdfile
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # chmod 640 /srv/svn/user_access/svn_passwdfile     
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # htpasswd2 /srv/svn/user_access/svn_passwdfile Pascal                                                                                 
New password:                                                                     
Re-type new password:                                                             
Adding password for user Pascal                                                   
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # rcapache2 restart                                  
Syntax OK
Shutting down httpd2 (waiting for all children to terminate)           done
Starting httpd2 (prefork)                                              done
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # svnadmin create /srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMS
Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # chown -R wwwrun:www /srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMS/{dav,db,locks}
chown: cannot access `/srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMS/dav': No such file or directory

So I thought… hey it might be the last slash. and tried

Bakhuis-Server:/home/Bakhuis # chown -R wwwrun:www /srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMS{dav,db,locks}
chown: cannot access `/srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMSdav': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access `/srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMSdb': No such file or directory
chown: cannot access `/srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMSlocks': No such file or directory

So no luck it seems to want a subdir ‘nav’ in /srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMS/, how do I continue?

As this has gone without a repsonse for a while, I’m open for suggestions on other ways of getting subversion to work as well… I mainly want to get it working and as this way was openSUSE specific it seemed like the safest bet… I’ve screwed it up before many times as well following other guides.

So if anyone actually got it working, following a guide… please show me the way.

Well the last attempt was wrong, but the second last attempt was almost right:

chown -R wwwrun:www /srv/svn/kdrepos/BakaCMS/{dav,db,locks}

except that dav doesn’t exist. Is it supposed to? Is there another step you have to do first to make it exist? I don’t know about DAV and SVN.

PS: I just looked at an existing SVN repo I have and it does have a dav subdirectory. Presumably the svnadmin create command is supposed to create it. Not sure why it didn’t for you. You should investigate that. Maybe you have an older version of subversion?

It seems

http://www.svnforum.org/2017/viewtopic.php?t=6829

in newer versions of subversion this dav subdirectory is not created by svnadmin create but by the first access of the repo by a client. So the howto you worked from is out of date and you should remove dav from the list in the braces and just proceed with the client access steps.

Thanks for clearing that up, I’ll attempt to follow the rest with that change and update the article afterwards if it works.

But make sure that the parent directory is owned by wwwrun so that the webserver can create the directory on demand when accessed from the client. Or else mkdir dav and chown it so that it exists.

I’ll have to consider starting a fanclub for you someday as this is the zillionth time you helped me out!

No success following the guide all over again but ommitting ‘dav’. So read your post, performed chown wwrun:www on it’s parent directory and completed the first import a few seconds later :slight_smile: