How to Install SVN Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS & 21.10

2 min readFeb 23, 2022

SVN offers secure SSL connection with user based authentication as well. You can give specific permission to users. You can also set up your own firewall on top of it to make it even more secure.

This article will help you for step-by-step setup of Subversion (SVN) server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS & 21.10 systems.

Step 1 — Install Apache

SVN run over Apache HTTP server. So we need to install Apache first.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2

Step 2 — Install SVN Server

Now we need to install SVN server and dependencies.

sudo apt-get install subversion

Step 3— Install Dependencies

We also need to install SVN dependencies and Apache mod for SVN.

sudo apt-get libapache2-mod-svn libapache2-svn libsvn-dev

After installation, we need to enable the Apache mod and restart the Apache server.

sudo a2enmod dav dav_svn
sudo service apache2 restart

Step 4— Creating your first SVN Repository

Create a new directory as base directory for all your repositories. Then create your new repository.

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/svn/
sudo svnadmin create /var/www/svn/myrepo

Step 5— Setup Directory Permissions

We need to configure correct permission to base directory

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/svn
sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/svn

Step 6— User Authentication

In this example, I am going with configure user authentication for SVN repositories. First, create a config file:

sudo touch /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd

Now add new user:

sudo htpasswd -m /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd myuser

Then it will ask for the password.

New Password: <Enter Your Password>
Re-type new password: <Confirm Your Password>

Step 7— Configure Apache for Subversion

We enabled SVN mod in Step 3 which created sample config file /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dav_svn.conf

sudo nano /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dav_svn.conf

Change the config as follows:

<Location /svn> # https://domain.com/svn
   DAV svn
   SVNParentPath /var/www/svn # svn base repo directory

   AuthType Basic
   AuthName "Subversion Repository"
   AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd
   Require valid-user
</Location>

Now restart the Apache2

sudo service apache2 restart

Yay! It's Done

Open the http://yourdomain/svn in your browser, and it will ask you for the user password.