Having used the Subversion version control system in my team programming projects at Berkeley and noticing my friends use it for their own single-developer projects, I finally decided that I too should start using it personally. And having it be remote-enabled will allow me to share code with others and invite others to work with me in a team.

I spent the last few hours struggling to get remote-enabled SVN + Trac + TortoiseSVN to work together. I never imagined that such a popular combination did not yet have a simple all-in-one installer without having to resort to command line and script hacking.

But…some googling led me to EasyTrac which promises to “be able to quickly deploy Trac and Subversion to your computer.”

Anyway, here is my detailed steps to getting all this to work together:

1. Install all these things on the computer you mean to be the svn server:
2. Install Python
3. Install EasyTrac – this will install Subversion and Trac and some helper packages
   
4. Choose “path” for access mode
5. Choose your apache port (other than 80 if you have a web server running)
6. You might want to leave the Subversion port as 3690 (I haven’t been able to change it later)
7. You need to port-forward both these ports on your router so that you can access from anywhere
8. Choose a good place to store all your repository + trac data (Authz, SVN, Trac folders will be created in it)
9. Let install finish
10. In Authz\SVN.acp, change line to “admin = admin, your-name”
11. In Authz\Users.acp, add line “your-name:your-password”. Change admin’s password also for safety
12. Create a practice repository (Start Menu -> EasyTrac -> Create Project)
13. In SVN\repository-name\conf, edit svnserve.conf to be
    1. anon-access = none
    2. auth-access = write
    3. password-db = passwd
    4. realm = some string
14. In SVN\repository-name\conf, edit passwd to be
    1. your-username = your-password
    2. admin = admin’s password
15. Install TortoiseSVN on the server and your personal computer
    
16. In Tortoise, go to repository svn://server-ip/repository-name
17. Add some files to the repository
18. Change them and commit them to the repository for testing
19. Go to http://localhost:apache-port/trac/repository-name to see TRAC at work!
20. Go to http://localhost:apache-port/svn/repository-name to see the SVN rep
21. You can login and go to admin->permissions to change anonymous access, make yourself admin, etc
22. If you want to backup/restore repositories, simply copy/paste the SVN\repository-name directory and TRAC\repository-name
23. From SVN programs, access your repository using svn://server-ip/repository-name

That’s it. Good luck coding.