Ken Kopczyk

I shouldn’t have to go into the importance of a good source control system. It allows you to do the following great things:

• track code changes over time
• rebuild old versions for technical support purposes
• discover the original author of the software so you can playfully fingerpoint when it breaks
• document features and bug fixes in a particular release
• it’s a giant “undo” button!  (as described in The Pragmatic Programmer)

Installing an SVN server as a windows service is painless:

1. Download and install the CollabNet SVN server and command-line client package on your server.
   • At the time of writing this, the latest stable version was 1.6.15.
   • Since we are installing this to run as a Windows Service, you can uncheck Apache in the “Choose Components” step. (Figure 1)
   • By default, SVN uses port 3690 and a default repository path of c:\svn_repository. (Figure 2)
2. To set up a repository, run the following command:  

   svnadmin create "c:\svn_repository"

3. Uncomment the following lines from c:\svn_repository\conf\svnserve.conf

   anon-access = read
   auth-access = write
   password-db = passwd
   

4. Add users to c:\svn_repository\conf\passwd

   [users]
   # harry = harryssecret
   # sally = sallyssecret
   user = password
   

5. Make sure port 3690 is open on your server if you have a firewall.
6. Start the “CollabNet Subversion svnserve” windows service and you’re server is good to go!

Next, we need to install some client components that can access the server:

1. Download and install TortoiseSVN on your client machine.
   • Allows you to access the SVN server and integrates into the windows shell.
   • At the time of writing, the latest version is 1.6.12, which is designed to work with SVN server 1.6.15
   • All default options are fine.
   • Requires restart.
2. Download and install WinMerge on your client machine.
   • Default options are fine, but ensure that “Integrate with TortoiseSVN” is checked. (Figure 3)
   • The TortoiseSVN integration allows WinMerge to handle diff’ing of code history.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3