Setting up Subversion in a VM

I need to get a pretty basic subversion setup, so I figured I'd give it a go. (There's one pretty basic VMWare appliance available from http://www.ytechie.com/svn-vm, but it's really old (Ubuntu 6.06, older version of subversion, etc...)

So, here's what I'm after:

• Up-to-date Ubuntu
• NTP (to keep time synch'd)
• Subversion 1.4 (latest stable), at least with svn+ssh access, but even better with https access
  
• WebSVN
• Webmin (so I don't have to get to the box to do stuff)

Lesson #1: Uninstall stuff you don't want before applying patches. This way, you don't wait for things like Open Office, Evolution, various games etc..., to all get updated, none of which are desired.

During setup, I noticed a common problem I (and others!) seem to always run into with linux in a VM...crazy key repeating. This post (on the linuxquestions.org) ends up with reconfiguring X. However, it seemed for me that just going to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard, and changing from "US 105 (Intl)" to "US 104" did the trick.

For setting up subversion, I'm referring to a post on the Ubuntu Help pages.

When it came time to install the certificate for Apache, another Ubuntu page came in handy.

Notes:

• This procedure winds up creating a self-signed certificate, which may not be sufficient in all cases.
• When you access svn, you'll be notified with an error message that starts off with, "Error validating server certificate for 'https://svn-server:443'". Go ahead and accept the certificate permanently.

Installing WebSVN: I noted above that I installed webSVN, but that was a mistake. I completely purged it, and then re-installed it. This time, the configuration was a bit better, asking me if I wanted to configure apache and where my svn repositories were. Now, when I hit https://svn-server/websvn, it works!

I did find another article at Howtoforge that gave some hints on configuring websvn. No matter what I did, though, trying to enable use of enscript doesn't want to work. Oh well, got bigger fish to fry.


Email Notifications: I installed svnmailer (from the Ubuntu repositories). The docs there pretty much tell you what to do... Testing this will have to wait until I'm in the office and the smtp server can be reached to do its thing... However, it appears that svnmailer has a bug, which causes practically unreadable diffs to be produced. Luckily, the debian bugs list suggests a work-around.

UFW: For security, I enabled ufw, and then set it to only allow ports 22 (ssh) and 443 (https).

SendMail: Well, turns out I needed to install sendmail locally. Just apt-get install, and all is good...gotta love it!

FogBugz Integration: The instructions for configuring the integration are here.


Late Breaking: Here's another site that has instructions for getting things going:Howtoforge.