LAMP and SVN on Ubuntu 8.10

This post is a rewrite of one of my older posts, Ubuntu as a dev machine, but this time I'll explain also how to setup a basic SVN besides the LAMP.

Ubuntu 8.10 was released bout a month ago and today I wasn't in the mood of doing any coding so I decided to try out the new Ubuntu. Once again, I'm installing it under VirtualBox (VB), cause it seems that they still haven't fixed the bug related to the rtl8187 chipset. Oh well...

Be sure to use VB v2.x.x. (v2.0.6. is the latest now), cause it's recognizing the correct screen resolution, not like VB v.1.6.4, whit which I had to configure manually the xorg.conf file...

Setting up LAMP

Here are the commands:

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If mod_rewrite doesn't work, do the following:

sudo gvim /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

And change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All.

Setting up SVN

I'm not gonna explain how SVN works or the terms, this is just how to set it up. If you are not familiar with versioning and Subversion, read this book: Version Control with Subversion. It's free, available for download and contains probably everything you need to know about SVN. Be sure to learn the commands like commit, import, export, checkout, add, info, etc...

There are 2 ways for setting up SVN: as an Apache module or to use svnserve which is designed for SVN. As I already have Apache installed, the best solution is to use Apache for SVN. It's using a module called mod_dav_svn.

The setup presented here is very basic, it has no authentication and probably is insecure, but it's good for my needs on localhost.

The commands:

sudo apt-get install subversion
sudo a2enmod dav
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo apt-get install libapache2-svn
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now we have all packages installed, only the configuration left.

First, I create a folder called svn under the var folder:

sudo mkdir /var/svn

Now I need to create a folder under the svn folder where all my repositories will be:

sudo svnadmin create /var/svn/repos

We use the svnadmin create command to create the repository; mkdir is not good for this.

Next, open up the httpd.conf file and add the following lines to it:

<Location /repos>
    DAV svn
    SVNPath /var/svn/repos
</Location>

I've seen people creating a new user and group for SVN. I think (I haven't looked into it detailed) that's for the authentication stuff. I did a much simpler thing: I added the ownership over /var/svn to www-data (Apache user):

sudo chown -R www-data /var/svn

This is probably a big security hole, but again: I use it only on localhost so I can live with that.

We are now ready to import a project into SVN, i.e. to add a project to the repository:

svn import -m "First import to SVN" /import/from/here/project file:///var/svn/repos/project/trunk

To start working on that project we need to checkout it:

svn checkout http://localhost/repos/project/trunk /var/www/project

Now the “project” is under SVN which should ease the development process. Since I'm using SVN I have no more backups of projects all over the place; if something goes wrong I know it's under SVN and I can revert to any older working version of my project.

Cheers!