Apache alias works in browser, but does not work while trying to access via svn client

Question

I am encountering an issue that drives me mad. I installed from scratch an ubuntu 14.04 machine, installed a LAMP stack and subversion. I created a new folder /var/www/svn and imported my various SVN dumps. Made sure they all were set in the svnserve.conf file to be accessible via svn:// and made as well sure that there's a user in the passwd file for me to access it. I added myself and the www-data user to that directory to make sure it is available in the internet. To not bother with too much attributes I started the svnserve with the following command svnserve -d.

I then went on to add to my 000-default.conf an alias Alias /svn /var/www/svn, restarted the apache2 service and it worked like a charm in the browser.

Now to my actual problem when I am trying to access the repo with tortoisesvn I get the error message that there's no svn at that location. After spending quite a while researching I see somebody mention that he was able to access it when using the 'full' path. So I tried the following svn://mydomain.com/var/www/svnand it works...

As the alias works in a browser, but doesn't in a SVN client I am totally flabbergasted.

Any ideas?

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To summarize: I am using www.example.com/svn/myrepo when it doesn't work, and when I am using www.example.com/var/www/svn/myrepo then it works.

Full 000-default.conf:

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName www.example.com ServerAlias example.com ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /var/www/html <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All </Directory> <Directory /var/www/html/> AllowOverride All Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> Alias /svn /var/www/svn ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined </VirtualHost> 

Output of apachectl -S

VirtualHost configuration:*:80 www.example.com (/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf:1) ServerRoot: "/etc/apache2" Main DocumentRoot: "/var/www" Main ErrorLog: "/var/log/apache2/error.log" Mutex default: dir="/var/lock/apache2" mechanism=fcntl Mutex mpm-accept: using_defaults Mutex watchdog-callback: using_defaults Mutex rewrite-map: using_defaults PidFile: "/var/run/apache2/apache2.pid" Define: DUMP_VHOSTS Define: DUMP_RUN_CFG User: name="www-data" id=33 not_used Group: name="www-data" id=33 not_used

Answer 1

The apache config file is only used when you access the repository using http or https. When you're using svn, the connection is handled by svnserve which is an entirely separate program.

The documentation for svnserve is available at the SVN book or the man page man svnserve and man svnserve.conf. You can set the root path when you invoke it, like so:

svnserve -r /var/www 

to make it start looking for files and repos under /var/www instead of immediately under /.