I recently moved my development server from a linux box to my primary machine, an iMac. I wanted to move my subversion repository while maintaining the file histories for everything inside. Worrying that it was going to be a huge issue, I was happy to discover it was completely simple:

On the existing repository machine, run:

svnadmin dump /path/to/repository > repository-name.dmp

Transfer your dump file to the new machine and then, create a repository. Once subversion is running and you have your repository created, import the dump file:

svnadmin load /path/to/repository-name< /path/to/repository-name.dmp

You’re done!

I recently began working exclusively on an iMac so I decided to setup a subversion server locally and as my new machine would simply replace my local development machine, which is a Fedora Core 6 pc.

You’ll need to setup at least one repository. I’m going to need multiple repositories that I can use for different clients so I have a bit of extra admin work ahead of me. You can setup as many repositories as you need, but no matter what you’ll need at least one. Here create the folders…

# mkdir /svn
# mkdir /svn/repos

Then we need to tell subversion to make our first repository.

# svnadmin create /svn/repos/myproject

First, I need to setup a config file for svnserve.

# vi /svn/repos/conf/svnserve.conf

Then, look for variations of the following code and edit it as necessary. By default any anonymous user can access the code so to disable that you must include anon-access = none, just commenting the value out will not prevent anonymous access.

anon-access = none
password-db = passwdfile
realm = My SVN Repository
auth-access = write

The password-db is just a path to a file containing usernames and passwords. You’ll create this file especially for SVN. I create each file inside of the repository conf directory. So, save your changes and then we’ll create said user file.

# vi passwdfile

Enter in something like:

[users]
username = password

Anyway, you’ll need to start the svn server.

# svnserve -d --listen-port=3690

One side note - svnserve just runs and doesn’t have a way to stop besides killing the process. If you make changes to the svnserve.conf or user file you’ll need to restart svnserve.

# killall svnserve

Then, go ahead and test (best to do so on a different machine).

# svn co --username=myusername svn://mydomain/svn/repos/myproject


The system should then ask you for your password. Go ahead and run some tests.

I’m always forgetting this command so I’m posting it here. This is the location of the mail log on mediatemple dv servers.

tail -f /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog

Many of my clients need a quick backup solution before we implement anything on a larger more permanent scale. I wrote this simple script that simply make a copy of a database and then created a timestamped tarball of the file.

#!bin/sh

date=`date +%Y-%m-%d_%Hh%M`

cd /my/path/for/backups/

mysqldump -umy_user -p”mypass” my_database > $date.sql

tar -zcvf $date.tgz *.sql

# uncomment this line to import the sql into another database, for example as a mirror
#mysql -umy_user -p”mypass” mirror_database < $date.sql

rm *.sql

Then, just setup a cron job to run this at whichever interval you want this to run.

It’s been a few years since I’ve released the first version of Bugzilla Changelog, and over those years many folks have been asking if I ever intend on making it open source. While essentially open anyway as it was a Perl script, I’m now accepting patches and new work from anyone else interested.

Those of you who have submitted patches over the years should be pretty excited. I’ll be tracking project updates, requests, fixes, etc, through sourceforge.

View Bugzilla Changelog at SourceForge.net.