Subversion installation troubles on Windows 8

Question

After successfully running subversion for years on a Windows 2008 server, I recently moved to Windows 8.1, mainly because the machine does also serve videos to my home network (works fine) and because Windows 8 provides better energy saving on my platform than Windows 2008 server did. So far, so good.

Then I tried to re-install Subversion. I intend to use the built-in server application svnserve.exe. I downloaded the latest windows package, installed it (success), and configured a service (svnserve --service ...) which I can successfully start using the Windows Service Management Console. Port 80 is already taken by a different application, so I let subversion pick 3690, which is fine for me. I used netstat to confirm that svnserve.exe is bound to port TCP:3690, which is listed OK. Just to clear one potential roadblock I also disabled the Windows firewall.

Then I created a sample repository named "test" using svnadmin locally, success as well, a subversion file structure appeared on the harddisk.

Problems arise when I try to access the repository using my local browser (Firefox), an attempt to connect to URLs

http://127.0.0.1:3690[/svn|/svn/test]

all three give me the same cryptical response:

( success ( 2 2 ( ) ( edit-pipeline svndiff1 absent-entries commit-revprops depth log-revprops atomic-revprops partial-replay inherited-props ephemeral-txnprops file-revs-reverse ) ) )

Somehow I have expected a subversion GUI instead.

Connecting from a remote machine via browser reveals the same useless line of text.

Connecting from a remote machine using my usual Tortoise client gives the message:

Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:3690/svn/test Error running context: The server unexpectedly closed the connection

I tried to add the --log-file option to svnserve, and indeed a log file appears once I start the service, but it is empty and it remains empty.

Trying to use svnserve -X instead of running it as a service reveals the exact same behavior.

Seems I am stuck. Anyone who has an idea what I can do to get that thing working?

Answer 1

Just to help out another beginner running into the same problem ... I finally found the problem: I simply used the wrong client, svnserve does not support web browsers. Using the Tortoise client, and providing the correct prefix (svn:127.0.0.1/...) was all I had to do.

The long version:

If one wants to work with the simple, reliable, fast, but plain-text and proprietary protocol based) svnserve service, he needs to use a proprietary client, like Tortoise, and the svn: prefix instead of http/https:, and no port, like

svn://mysvnserver/testrepo

If needed, one may even reconfigure svnservice to use authentication and encryption later. svnserve isn't supporting web browsers, if one tries to access svnserve using a web browser like I did he gehts the internals of the svn protocol dumped to the screen.

If one wants to use his web browser, http/https protocol, and niceties, like a user friendly browser based interface and some remote administration capabilities, he must not use svnserve, but install a web server service (like apache) and configure if for use with subversion.

So in the end my problem had nothing to do with Windows 8. It just has slipped from my mind that years ago I went the apache path, while now I decided that the built-in svnserve service was good enough for my needs.

Armin.