Unifying Sync and Backup - Part 2

This is a follow up to the first part, which outlines some of the motivation and justification behind using a Subversion monorepo to sync all files across different computers. As a companion, I thought I would go through some of the technical details of setting it up. This is not a tutorial, but with the appropriate changes to the parts which are specific to my set-up, such as file paths, it could be followed as though it was one.

For my current setup I am running (Ubuntu Server)[https://ubuntu.com/download/server], hence the use of apt below, and other Ubuntu specific things. These steps can be completed on a fresh install.

The first step was to install Subversion and Apache.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install subversion apache2 libapache2-mod-svn

Then to create a folder to hold the repositories.

mkdir /home/aaron/subversion

The configuration file for Apache which will contain the Subversion server's settings can be found at /etc/apache2/mods-available/dav_svn.conf, and for my setup, I added the following to it.

<Location /svn>
    DAV svn
    SVNParentPath /home/aaron/subversion
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "svn-repository"
    AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd
    Require valid-user
    LimitXMLRequestBody 8000000
    LimitRequestBody 0
</Location>

Then I restarted the server by running

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

and set the appropriate permissions with

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /home/aaron/subversion

Finally the user can be created, here by the name of aaron, by running

sudo htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd aaron

which gets stored in the AuthUserFile specified within the configuration file from earlier.

With the server setup, a new repository, with the name repo can be created by first creating the folder

mkdir /home/aaron/subversion/repo

and then telling Subversion to treat this as a repository, and setting the appropriate permissions

svnadmin create /home/aaron/subversion/repo
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /home/aaron/subversion/repo

Before moving to the client computer, it is also important to grap the IP address with

hostname -I

Now, with the IP address in hand, checking out the repository is as simple as running

svn checkout http://<ip>/svn/repo

For my setup, I also do a sync to Backblaze by running

b2 sync --delete --replace-newer /home/aaron/subversion/ b2://<backblaze-bucket>/

where b2 is the backblaze command line tool, and <backblaze-bucket> is replaced with the unique name of the bucket I am sending to. This does a one way sync, meaning it forces the bucket to exactly match the local file.