How do you setup a shared Working Copy in Subversion

Question

I still very new using Subversion.

Is it possible to have a working copy on a network available share (c:\\svn\\projects\\website) that everyone (in this case 3 of use)

Answer 1

In my experience it will work just fine out of the box. At my company we have had this setup for a number of years and not experienced any problems (outside the obvious ones of having a shared working copy).

You should however look into having separate working copies and a trigger (hook) that updates the shared location on commits if you need a "live" version of the site.

Answer 2

You need to use svnserve (light-weight SVN server that comes with SVN) or apache mod.

With it, you can configure permissions like this:

[general]
password-db = userfile
realm = example realm

# anonymous users can only read the repository
anon-access = read

# authenticated users can both read and write
auth-access = write

Answer 3

You can't checkout a working copy, a working copy is the term used for code that has already been checked out. If you are asking multiple developers to work with the same set of working files at the same time, then you are seriously undermining one of the main uses of having a version control system, which is to allow your developers to make changes independently of one another without breaking things for anyone else.

That said, if you really want to do this you can. With a Linux server, the way to go is to have each of your users running a different ssh user agent (for windows machines we use Pagent) with a different ssh identity for each user. Then have the svn server recognize the ssh-tunnels from different identities as being from different users. Unfortunately, I don't know how to set that up in Windows.