Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

This is a very short tutorial – it should take you about 15 minutes from start to end – that explains how to run your own SVN server, install WebSVN, which is a web front-end to browse your SVN repository, and apply Drupal syntax highlighting to it.

An example can be seen used to be online at websvn.wimleers.com.

SVN

I run my own SVN repository, because it's much faster (svn:// FTW), I don't have size limitations, I can ensure it's backed up properly and because it's so easy.
I'm going to assume you've already installed svn on your (Linux) server.

First, decide where you're going to put all your SVN repositories. I put mine at /data/svn. Whenever I use the e command, use your favorite editor instead (for me e is an alias for TextMate). Then go through these simple steps:

cd /data/svn
svnadmin create reponame

cd reponame/conf
e svnserve.conf

e passwd

svnserve -d -r /data/svn

WebSVN

This part is simply amazingly effortless. Assuming you're using Apache, create the proper virtual host, e.g. websvn.example.com. For me this means that Apache looks for files in /data/www/websvn.example.com.

Now, onto the actual installation (2.1.0 was the latest version of WebSVN at the time of writing, you should replace this by the current version):

cd /data/www/websvn.example.com
svn co http://websvn.tigris.org/svn/websvn/tags/2.1.0 .

chmod 0777 cache

cd include
cp distconfig.php config.php
e config.php

$config->addRepository('Some repository', 'file:///data/svn/somerepository');

$config->expandTabsBy(2);

If you'd like to tweak the interface a little bit, that is, the left sidebar on the front page, you should edit templates/calm/index.tmpl to your liking. It's plain HTML.

Drupal syntax highlighting for WebSVN

And last but not least: Drupal syntax highlighting – including links to api.drupal.org – within WebSVN.
This is easier than it looks, thanks to the code included in the excellent GeSHi Filter module for Drupal. We'll just borrow their Drupal 6 GeSHi language definition file.
You can either apply the patch I've attached to this tutorial, or do it yourself, by following the steps below.
Download the drupal6.php file that ships with it and place it in the lib/geshi directory, that same directory contains GeSHi language definition files for all other supported languages.
Now we have to map certain file extensions to use this language definition. For that, we'll have to hack WebSVN in one file: include/setup.php. Add this to the $extEnscript array (around line 200):

  // Drupal support.
  '.inc'     => 'drupal6',
  '.install' => 'drupal6',
  '.module'  => 'drupal6',
  '.profile' => 'drupal6',
  '.test'    => 'drupal6',

Managing the server

Managing this server is very easy: SVN upgrades should come with your operating system's packet manager.
Your changes to WebSVN can be stored through a simple patch:

cd /data/www/websvn.example.com
svn add include/config.php
svn add lib/geshi/drupal6.php
svn diff > mywebsvn.patch

Update: I stopped using WebSVN because it was generating caches of multiple gigabytes in size. Which obviously sucks — it's understandable, but they should offer the option to set a maximum cache size, or a cache TTL.