In anticipation of our impending move off of Visual Source Safe (finally!) I decided to get my SCM of choice, Subversion, up and running on my Linux box (Fedora Core 4) at home. I’ve used SVN on Windows quite a bit, and have also used an excellent, excellent hosted SVN account at cvsdude.com, but since I may well be the one who winds up administering SVN at work, I thought it was high time to dig a bit deeper.

I also have just started using Trac over at cvsdude.com and decided to install that locally as well. (If you haven’t checked it out yet, Trac is seriously cool stuff, and I’ve barely scratched the surface thus far.) As with all things Linux there’s a bit of manual configuration involved, but in general the process of getting SVN and Trac installed was as simple as typin

yum install trac

in a term window. It downloaded all the necessary dependent packages (including SVN itself) and installed them automatically.

So at this point I have Trac and SVN “installed,” but that doesn’t really mean much. Trac has some great documentation to get you going, however, and the only thing I needed to do in addition to what they outline is chmod on my svn database file and directory in order to let Trac hit it. After that Trac was up and running!

Never one to leave well enough alone, I decided I wanted to tie SVN into Apache using mod_dav_svn. Again this was pretty typical Linux stuff:

yum install mod_dav_svn

to get the files down and then some minor tweaks to the httpd.conf file. I then bounced Apache and was off to the races. There’s some nice documentation about SVN + Apache that will walk you through it.

Next step for me is to get some user access settings in place, but so far not a bad installation process at all. If you’re on Windows and just want SVN, the one-click installer (link above) is definitely the way to go. It gives you everything you need to run SVN through svnserve and even installs svnserve as a Windows service for you. I haven’t attempted a Trac installation on Windows because quite honestly the Linux install seemed a lot simpler, but there are instructions for installing Trac on Windows over at the Trac web site.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this as I dig into it further, but as I’ve said before, I just can’t work without good source code control anymore. Even for a relatively small side project I just started on which I’m the only developer, the first thing I did was get an SVN repo going for it. If you haven’t used SCM before or have only used bad SCM like VSS, I strongly recommend giving SVN a shot. Get CFEclipse, the Subclipse plugin (although be wary of versions …), and give this stuff a whirl. It’s a better, safer way to develop and opens up all sorts of flexibility with managing your code that you just can’t get any other way.

For further info, I recommend Version Control with Subversion and Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion. Both are extremely helpful from a conceptual as well as a technical perspective.

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