<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>The Subversion Repository, Defined</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css" /> <meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.76.1" /> <style type="text/css"> body { background-image: url('images/draft.png'); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: top left; /* The following properties make the watermark "fixed" on the page. */ /* I think that's just a bit too distracting for the reader... */ /* background-attachment: fixed; */ /* background-position: center center; */ }</style> <link rel="home" href="index.html" title="Version Control with Subversion [DRAFT]" /> <link rel="up" href="svn.reposadmin.html" title="Chapter 5. Repository Administration" /> <link rel="prev" href="svn.reposadmin.html" title="Chapter 5. Repository Administration" /> <link rel="next" href="svn.reposadmin.planning.html" title="Strategies for Repository Deployment" /> </head> <body> <div xmlns="" id="vcws-version-notice"> <p>This text is a work in progress—highly subject to change—and may not accurately describe any released version of the Apache™ Subversion® software. Bookmarking or otherwise referring others to this page is probably not such a smart idea. Please visit <a href="http://www.svnbook.com/">http://www.svnbook.com/</a> for stable versions of this book.</p> </div> <div class="navheader"> <table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"> <tr> <th colspan="3" align="center">The Subversion Repository, Defined</th> </tr> <tr> <td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="svn.reposadmin.html">Prev</a> </td> <th width="60%" align="center">Chapter 5. Repository Administration</th> <td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="svn.reposadmin.planning.html">Next</a></td> </tr> </table> <hr /> </div> <div class="sect1" title="The Subversion Repository, Defined"> <div class="titlepage"> <div> <div> <h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="svn.reposadmin.basics"></a>The Subversion Repository, Defined</h2> </div> </div> </div> <p>Before jumping into the broader topic of repository administration, let's further define what a repository is. How does it look? How does it feel? Does it take its tea hot or iced, sweetened, and with lemon? As an administrator, you'll be expected to understand the composition of a repository both from a literal, OS-level perspective—how a repository looks and acts with respect to non-Subversion tools—and from a logical perspective—dealing with how data is represented <span class="emphasis"><em>inside</em></span> the repository.</p> <p>Seen through the eyes of a typical file browser application (such as Windows Explorer) or command-line based filesystem navigation tools, the Subversion repository is just another directory full of stuff. There are some subdirectories with human-readable configuration files in them, some subdirectories with some not-so-human-readable data files, and so on. As in other areas of the Subversion design, modularity is given high regard, and hierarchical organization is preferred to cluttered chaos. So a shallow glance into a typical repository from a nuts-and-bolts perspective is sufficient to reveal the basic components of the repository:</p> <div class="informalexample"> <pre class="screen"> $ ls repos conf/ db/ format hooks/ locks/ README.txt </pre> </div> <p>Here's a quick fly-by overview of what exactly you're seeing in this directory listing. (Don't get bogged down in the terminology—detailed coverage of these components exists elsewhere in this and other chapters.)</p> <div class="variablelist"> <dl> <dt> <span class="term">conf/</span> </dt> <dd> <p>This directory is a container for configuration files.</p> </dd> <dt> <span class="term">db/</span> </dt> <dd> <p>This directory contains the data store for all of your versioned data.<sup>[<a id="idp14173840" href="#ftn.idp14173840" class="footnote">49</a>]</sup></p> </dd> <dt> <span class="term">format</span> </dt> <dd> <p>This file describes the repository's internal organizational scheme. (As it turns out, the <code class="filename">db/</code> subdirectory sometimes also contains a <code class="filename">format</code> file which describes only the contents of that subdirectory and which is not to be confused with this file.)</p> </dd> <dt> <span class="term">hooks/</span> </dt> <dd> <p>This directory contains hook script templates and hook scripts, if any have been installed.</p> </dd> <dt> <span class="term">locks/</span> </dt> <dd> <p>Subversion uses this directory to house repository lock files, used for managing concurrent access to the repository.</p> </dd> <dt> <span class="term">README.txt</span> </dt> <dd> <p>This is a brief text file containing merely a notice to readers that the directory they are looking in is a Subversion repository.</p> </dd> </dl> </div> <div class="note" title="Note" style="margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.5in;"> <table border="0" summary="Note"> <tr> <td rowspan="2" align="center" valign="top" width="25"> <img alt="[Note]" src="images/note.png" /> </td> <th align="left">Note</th> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" valign="top"> <p> <a id="idp14183872" class="indexterm"></a>Prior to Subversion 1.5, the on-disk repository structure also always contained a <code class="filename">dav</code> subdirectory. <code class="filename">mod_dav_svn</code> used this directory to store information about WebDAV <em class="firstterm">activities</em>—mappings of high-level WebDAV protocol concepts to Subversion commit transactions. Subversion 1.5 changed that behavior, moving ownership of the activities directory, and the ability to configure its location, into <code class="filename">mod_dav_svn</code> itself. Now, new repositories will not necessarily have a <code class="filename">dav</code> subdirectory unless <code class="filename">mod_dav_svn</code> is in use and hasn't been configured to store its activities database elsewhere. See <a class="xref" href="svn.serverconfig.httpd.html#svn.serverconfig.httpd.ref.mod_dav_svn" title="mod_dav_svn configuration directives">the section called “mod_dav_svn configuration directives”</a> for more information.</p> </td> </tr> </table> </div> <p>Of course, when accessed via the Subversion libraries, this otherwise unremarkable collection of files and directories suddenly becomes an implementation of a virtual, versioned filesystem, complete with customizable event triggers. This filesystem has its own notions of directories and files, very similar to the notions of such things held by real filesystems (such as NTFS, FAT32, ext3, etc.). But this is a special filesystem—it hangs these directories and files from revisions, keeping all the changes you've ever made to them safely stored and forever accessible. This is where the entirety of your versioned data lives.</p> <div class="footnotes"> <br /> <hr width="100" align="left" /> <div class="footnote"> <p><sup>[<a id="ftn.idp14173840" href="#idp14173840" class="para">49</a>] </sup>Strictly speaking, Subversion doesn't dictate that the versioned data live here, and there are known (albeit proprietary) alternative backend storage implementations which do not, in fact, store data in this directory.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="navfooter"> <hr /> <table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"> <tr> <td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="svn.reposadmin.html">Prev</a> </td> <td width="20%" align="center"> <a accesskey="u" href="svn.reposadmin.html">Up</a> </td> <td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="svn.reposadmin.planning.html">Next</a></td> </tr> <tr> <td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Chapter 5. Repository Administration </td> <td width="20%" align="center"> <a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a> </td> <td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Strategies for Repository Deployment</td> </tr> </table> </div> <div xmlns="" id="vcws-footer"> <hr /> <img src="images/cc-by.png" style="float: right;" /> <p>You are reading <em>Version Control with Subversion</em> (for Subversion 1.8), by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick, and C. Michael Pilato.</p> <p>This work is licensed under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">Creative Commons Attribution License v2.0</a>.</p> <p>To submit comments, corrections, or other contributions to the text, please visit <a href="http://www.svnbook.com/">http://www.svnbook.com/</a>.</p> </div> </body> </html>