Subversion has a number of very good clients, but sometimes you need to give non Geek staff access to your repositories, this usually presents a problem as the inner workings of subversion are hard to grasp if your not tech savvy.

Fortunately subversion (when exposed via Apache) partially implements a DeltaV server and exposes just enough to allow a standard WebDav client to connect, add, rename and delete files or folders. You do however need to explicitly enable this in order for it to work.

In your Apache http.conf you will have a location tag that exposes your repository to the out side world (something like this) :

  DAV svn
  SVNPath /path/to/repository
 

  DAV svn
  SVNPath /path/to/repository

  #Enable WebDav client access for my marketing department.
  SVNAutoversioning on
  ModMimeUsePathInfo on

All modern Operating Systems allow you to mount a WebDav folder as a drive or folder:

Mounting a WebDav folder in Windows XP

Open the special folder called “My Network Places”, then click on “Add a network place” and fill in the URL of your repository url (like “http://svn.codespaces.com/account/repos”)

Mounting a WebDav folder in OS X

From the finder Go menu, connect to server and supply the repository URL (like “http://svn.codespaces.com/account/repos”)

Mounting a WebDav folder in Linux

You already know how to do this right?

Once the folder (or drive) is mounted you can use it as if it was a normal folder on you hard disk.

NOTE When adding files or folders to a Repository via WebDav each transaction is a least one commit in the SVN repository and adding a file is two commits (one to add the file, and one to add the file data), so adding 100 files will increment your repository revision by 200! This is also very ineeficient as it has to upload 1 file at a time.

Apart form the limitation and inefficiencies noted above this is a really useful way of granting access to your repositories to non IT users, for instance we have a repository for our marking materials which is simply mounted as a folder (in OS X) or as a drive (in XP) allowing everyone working on a project to simply save images, pdf, etc into the repos without having to update and commit from within a Subversion client.

Code Spaces If your using Code Spaces for your Subversion Hosting (and why wouldn’t you!!!) we can enable WebDav client access for you (it’s not on by default), simply send a mail to support[at]codespaces.com with your repository URL and we will enable it ASAP.