Subversion file permission

Permissions are inherited from a path's parent directory. That means we can specify a subdirectory with a different access policy for Sally. Let's continue our previous example, and grant Sally write access to a child of the branch that she's otherwise permitted only to read:.

Now Sally can write to the testing subdirectory of the branch, but can still only read other parts. It's also possible to explicitly deny permission to someone via inheritance rules, by setting the username variable to nothing:. The thing to remember is that the most specific path always matches first.

The server tries to match the path itself, and then the parent of the path, then the parent of that, and so on. The net effect is that mentioning a specific path in the access file will always override any permissions inherited from parent directories. By default, nobody has any access to any repository at all. That means that if you're starting with an empty file, you'll probably want to give at least read permission to all users at the roots of the repositories.

This is a common setup; notice that no repository name is mentioned in the section name. This makes all repositories world-readable to all users. Once all users have read access to the repositories, you can give explicit rw permission to certain users on specific subdirectories within specific repositories. Note that while all of the previous examples use directories, that's only because defining access rules on directories is the most common case.

You may similarly restrict access on file paths, too. To do this, create a groups section in your access file, and then describe your groups within that section: each variable's name defines the name of the group, and its value is a comma-delimited list of usernames which are part of that group. Groups can be granted access control just like users.

Another important fact is that group permissions are not overridden by individual user permissions. Rather, the combination of all matching permissions is granted. Permissions for group members can only be extended beyond the permissions the group already has. Restricting users who are part of a group to less than their group's permissions is impossible. Some authentication systems expect and carry relatively short usernames of the sorts we've been describing here— harry , sally , joe , and so on.

With usernames like that, the access file can become quite bloated with long or obscure usernames that are easy to mistype. Fortunately, Subversion 1. Active 3 years, 3 months ago. Viewed 29k times. Improve this question. Community Bot 1 1 1 silver badge. Belmin Fernandez Belmin Fernandez 7, 9 9 gold badges 48 48 silver badges 75 75 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Dave Jarvis CoolBeans CoolBeans Home Features Pricing Blog.

Can I restrict access to my Subversion repositories? July 12th, by Scott McNab. Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Installing SVN in Linux, is not so complicated, just follow the steps in the tutorial below and you should have it done in 10 minutes.

We are also going to show you, some basic SVN commands in Linux. Please remember to replace 1. To create a working copy to another local directory, use:. File will be added to the repository when you do an svn commit.