USVN with CentOS 5

If you are looking for a Subversion web interface, chances are you come across USVN (User-friendly SVN). I first used it in August 2009 during a complex proof-of-concept (PoC). The current version at the time was 0.7.2 and it was of great help. Nevertheless there were a few things missing, esp. LDAP support. So I was really happy to recently learn that the project is being continued (it is an end-of-studies project) and in fact one of the first new features is support for LDAP.

One of the challenges I came across during the installation was the systems check that reported “Subversion has not been detected”. This simply means that the Subversion client binary (svn) was not found on the search path (PATH). The reason for this in my case was the fact that I had done a custom installation of Subversion and not relied on the one that comes with CentOS. For details on this please check [cref 879 this post] where I also present a way to custom-define environment variables for the Apache web server. Here is the respective snippet with the search path added (my changes are in bold)start() {
echo -n $"Starting $prog: "
check13 || exit 1
LANG=$HTTPD_LANG LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/CollabNet_Subversion/lib PATH=$PATH:/opt/CollabNet_Subversion/bin daemon --pidfile=${pidfile} $httpd $OPTIONS
RETVAL=$?
echo
[ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch ${lockfile}
return $RETVAL
}
With this amendment the system check passed just fine. It should be noted, however, that at least for v1.0.1 this check is not complete. E.g. it misses on PHP support for the database. So you most likely also want to install php-pdo and php-mysql:yum install php-pdo php-mysql SQLite did not work at a first try whereas MySQL did, so I went for the latter.

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