Daemon svnserve over xinetd

The subversion manual says how to start svnserve using inetd. However, some Linux distributions contain xinetd instead. The syntax of its configuration file for use with svnserve will be explained below.

First you have to make sure that file /etc/services contains definition of port 3690:

svn           3690/tcp   # Subversion
svn           3690/udp   # Subversion

Next we look into configuration file /etc/xinetd.conf. Configuration of services may be read from files in another directory. The file contains usually at its end a line:

includedir /etc/xinetd.d

Now put file svn to the above mentioned directory. The contents of the file is also displayed below.

# default: off
# description: Subversion server for the svn protocol
service svn
{
disabled                = yes
port                    = 3690
socket_type             = stream
protocol                = tcp
wait                    = no
user                    = subversion
server                  = /usr/local/bin/svnserve
server_args             = -i -r /home/subversion/repositories
}

• The comments are used by the GUI configurator.
• disabled = yes says that svnserve is switched off at the system startup.
• user = subversion defines the user under which the service runs. Make sure that the user of such a name exists.
• server = /usr/local/bin/svnserve is the full path to program svnserve.
• server_args contains the command line parameters. Parameter -i means that the service runs over (x)inetd, parameter -r defines the root directory of repositories.

In RHEL based distributions you inform the system about existence of a ne service by:

/sbin/chkconfig --add svn

Now you can control svnserve both by the chkconfig program and by a graphical configuration tool.