WebSVN Error ‘svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL’
Tonight I was setting up subversion and websvn on a small CentOS VPS and I came across an issue where, after commit to a change my WebSVN interface would break, complaining “svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL”. There was also a permission denied error mixed in there, which immediately pointed to file permissions.
$ svn commit -m "testing commit"
Sending testing.txt
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 4.However when then logging into my websvn – I saw the following:
Error running this command: svn --non-interactive --config-dir /tmp log --xml --verbose --limit 2 'file:///var/svn-repos/mytestrepo/trunk/testing.txt'svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL
svn: Unable to open repository 'file:///var/svn-repos/mytestrepo/trunk/testing.txt'
svn: Can't open file '/var/svn-repos/mytestrepo/trunk/testing.txt/format': Permission deniedBasically when I commit to the change, I am overwriting files in my repository, including the permissions of those files. So, In order to get a quick-fix, I simply changed my ssh user’s group to the same group I have setup on the svn-repos directory and adding myself to any secondary groups.
So to add a user to a primary group called “subversion”:
$ useradd -g subversion jakeThen view that user:
$ id jake
Then add user ‘jake’ to any other secondary user groups:
$ usermod -a -G ftp jakePlease note that the user syntax will vary when using Debian, From memory it is along the lines of: groupadd <user> <group>
