Overview
Creating a repository group
Anyone with an active SEAS account may request a Subversion repository group by sending email to achelp@seas.harvard.edu. In your email, please specify the name you would like for the repository group. This may be your username, or it may be the name of a project or research group.
Managing your repository group
Once your repository group has been created, we will send you an email with the command necessary to check out the administrative repository. For a repository group named "bigproject", the command would look like this:
svn co https://source.seas.harvard.edu/svn/bigproject/admin/
This would create a directory called admin in your current directory with the contents of the administrative repository.
The administrative repository
The administrative repository is a meta-repository that allows you to control your Subversion repository group. The admin repository contains the following files and directories:
authz
This is the primary configuration file for the repository group. It is a standard Subversion authorization file, described in the Path-Based Authorization section of the Subversion book. This is where you create new repositories and control access to your repositories.
htpasswd
This is a standard Apache "htpasswd" file that can be used to provide access to your Subversion repositories for someone without a SEAS account.
svnbiosis.conf
This configuration file controls certain aspects of your repository group. You will generally not need to edit this file.
keydir
It is possible to access your Subversion repository via ssh instead of using http. This directory is where you would store ssh keys if you were using this mechanism. If you are interested in using ssh for Subversion access, please contact us.
Adding new repositories
You add new repositories to your repository group by adding new stanzas to the authz file and committing the changes. For example, to add a repository called "niftycode" to your "bigproject" repository group, you would add the following to your authz file:
[niftycode:/] lars = rw
This grants read/write (rw) access to all of the niftycode repository to user lars. When you commit this change to the server, the server will create the niftycode repository if it does not already exist.
Note that there is no way to delete repositories. This is safety measure to prevent accidental typos from causing loss of data. If you remove a repository from your authz file, you can always put it back at a later date to restore access to the data.
Controlling access to repositories
You control access to repositories by editing the authz file in your administrative repository. To grant a user "alice" read access to your documents repository, you might modify this:
[documents:/] lars = rw
To look like this:
[documents:/] lars = rw alice = r
This gives alice the ability to view all of the documents repository. If instead you wanted alice to have access to only the unclassified directory of the repository, you would instead modify your authz file to look like this:
[documents:/] lars = rw [documents:/unclassified/] alice = r
Receiving emailed commit logs
If you want to receive an email message when someone commits changes to a repository, you may set the seas:review property on the repository root directory to a list of email addresses. For example:
$ cd myproject $ svn propedit seas:review . ...make your changes... $ svn ci -m 'added reviewers'