man SVN::Web (3): Subversion repository web frontend

SYNOPSIS

If you are upgrading an existing SVN::Web installation then please see UPDATING.pod. Installing new SVN::Web versions without making sure the configuration file, templates, and localisations are properly updated and merged will likely break your current installation.

To get started with SVN::Web.

1.

Create a directory for SVN::Web's configuration files, templates, stylesheets, and other data.

mkdir svnweb

2.

Run "svnweb-install" in this directory to configure the environment.

  cd svnweb
  svnweb-install

3.

Edit the file config.yaml that's been created, and add the following two lines:

  repos:
    test: 'file:///path/to/repo'

"file:///path/to/repo" should be the URL for an existing Subversion repository.

4.

Either configure your web server (see ``WEB SERVERS'') to use SVN::Web, or run with "plackup" to start a simple web server for testing.

  plackup -Ilib/ ./SVN-Web.psgi

5.

Point your web browser at the correct URL to browse your repository. If you've run "plackup" then this is <http://localhost:5000/>.

See <https://github.com/djzort/SVN-Web> for the SVN::Web source code.

DESCRIPTION

SVN::Web provides a web interface to subversion repositories. It's features include:

Viewing multiple Subversion repositories. SVN::Web is a full Subversion client, so you can access repositories on the local disk (with the "file:///" scheme) or that are remotely accessible using the "http://" and "svn://" schemes.
Browsing every revision of the repository.
Viewing the contents of files in the repository at any revision.
Viewing diffs of arbitrary revisions of any file. Diffs can be viewed as plain unified diffs, or HTML diffs that use colour to more easily show what's changed.
Viewing the revision log of files and directories, see what was changed when, by who.
Viewing the blame/annotation details of any file.
Generating RSS feeds of commits, down to the granularity of individual files. The RSS feeds are auto-discoverable in modern web browsers.
Viewing everything that was changed in a revision, and step through revisions one at a time, viewing the history of the repository.
Viewing the interface in a number of different languages. SVN::Web's interface is fully templated and localised, allowing you to change the look-and-feel without writing any code; all strings in the interface are stored in a separate file, to make localising to different languages easier.
Rich log message linking. You can configure SVN::Web to recognise patterns in your log messages and automatically generate links to other web based systems. For example, if your log messages often refer to tickets in your request tracking system:
```
  Reported in: t#1234
```
then SVN::Web can turn "t#1234" in to a link to that ticket. SVN::Web can also be configured to recognise e-mail addresses, URLs, and anything else you wish to make clickable.
Caching. Internally, SVN::Web caches most of the data it gets from the repository, helping to speed up repeated visits to the same page, and reducing the impact on your repository server.
As SVK repositories are also Subversion repositories, you can do all of the above with those too.

Additional actions can easily be added to the base set supported by the core of SVN::Web.

CONFIGURATION

Various aspects of SVN::Web's behaviour can be controlled through the configuration file config.yaml. See the "YAML" documentation for information about writing YAML format files.

Version number

SVN::Web's configuration file must contain a version number. If this number is missing, or does not match the version number of the version of SVN::Web that is being used then a fatal error will occur.

  version: 0.53

Repositories

Local and remote repositories

SVN::Web can show information from one or more Subversion repositories. These repositories do not have to be located on the same server.

Repositories are specified as a hash items under the "repos" key. Each key is the repository name (defined by you), the value is the repository's URL.

The three types of repository are specified like so.

  repos:
    my_local_repo: 'file:///path/to/local/repo'
    my_http_repo: 'http://hostname/path'
    my_svn_repo: 'svn://hostname/path'

You may list as many repositories as you need.

For backwards compatibility, if a repository URL is specified without a scheme, and starts with a "/" then the "file:///" scheme is assumed. So

  repos:
    my_local_repo: /path/to/local/repo

is also valid.

Local repositories under a single root

If you have multiple repositories that are all under a single parent directory then use "reposparent".

  reposparent: '/path/to/parent/directory'

If you set "reposparent" then you can selectively block certain repositories from being browseable by specifying the "block" setting.

  block:
    - 'first_subdir_to_block'
    - 'second_subdir_to_block'

"repos" and "reposparent" are mutually exclusive.

Templates

SVN::Web's output is entirely template driven. SVN::Web ships with a number of different template styles, installed in to the templates/ subdirectory of wherever you ran "svnweb-install".

The default templates are installed in templates/trac. These implement a look and feel similar to the Trac (<http://www.edgewall.com/trac/>) output.

To change to another set, use the "templatedirs" configuration directive.

For example, to use a set of templates that implement a much plainer look and feel:

  templatedirs:
    - 'template/plain'

Alternatively, if you have your own templates elsewhere you can specify a full path to the templates.

  templatedirs:
    - '/full/path/to/template/directory'

You can specify more than one directory in this list, and templates will be searched for in each directory in turn. This makes it possible for actions that are not part of the core SVN::Web to ship their own templates, and for you to override specific templates of your choice.

For example, if an action is using a template called "view", and "templatedirs" is configured like so:

  templatedirs:
    - '/my/local/templates'
    - '/templates/that/ship/with/svn-web'

then /my/local/templates/view will first by checked. If it exists the search terminates and it's used. If it does not exist then the search continues in /templates/that/ship/with/svn-web.

For more information about writing your own templates see ``ACTIONS, SUBCLASSES, AND URLS''.

Languages

SVN::Web's interface is fully localised and ships with a number of translations. The default web interface allows the user to choose from the available localisations at will, and the user's choice is saved in a cookie.

Localisation directories

SVN::Web's localisation information is stored in files with names that take the form "language".po. SVN::Web ships with a number of localisations that are automatically installed with SVN::Web.

You can configure SVN::Web to search in additional directories for localisation files. There are typically three reasons for this.

1.: You wish to add support for a new language, and have placed your localisation files in a different directory.
2.: You wish to change the localisation for a language that SVN::Web already supports, and don't wish to overwrite the localisation file that SVN::Web ships with.
3.: You have installed a third party SVN::Web::action, and this action includes its own localisation files stored in a different directory.

Use the "language_dirs" configuration to specify all the additional directories that SVN::Web should search. For example:

  language_dirs:
    - /path/to/my/local/translation
    - /path/to/third/party/action/localisation

If files in more than one directory contain the same localisation key for the same language then the file in the directory that is listed last in this directive will be used.

Available languages

"languages" specifies the localisations that are considered available. This is a hash. The keys are the basenames of available localisation files, the values are the language name as it should appear in the interface. "svnweb-install" will have set this to a default value.

To find the available localisation files look in the po/ directory that was created in the directory in which you ran "svnweb-install", and in the directories listed in the "language_dirs" directive (if any).

For example, the default (as of SVN::Web 0.48) is:

  languages:
    en: English
    fr: Fran&ccedil;ais
    zh_cn: Chinese (Simplified)
    zh_tw: Chinese (Traditional)

Default language

"default_language", specifies the language to use if the user has not selected one. The value for this option should be one of the keys defined in "languages". For example;

  default_language: fr

Data cache

SVN::Web can use any module implementing the Cache::Cache interface to cache the data it retrieves from the repository. Since this data does not normally change this reduces the time it takes SVN::Web to generate results.

This cache is not enabled by default.

To enable the cache you must specify a class that implements a Cache::Cache interface. Cache::SizeAwareFileCache is a good choice.

  cache:
    class: Cache::SizeAwareFileCache

The class' constructor may take various options. Specify those under the "opts" key.

For example, Cache::SizeAwareFileCache supports (among others) options called "max_size", "cache_root", and "directory_umask". These could be configured like so:

  # Use the SizeAwareFileCache.  Place it under /var/tmp instead of
  # the default (/tmp), use a custom umask, and limit the cache size to
  # 1MB
  cache:
    class: Cache::SizeAwareFileCache
    opts:
      max_size: 1000000
      cache_root: /var/tmp/svn-web-cache
      directory_umask: 077

Note: The "namespace" option, if specified, is ignored, and is always set to the name of the repository being accessed.

Template cache

Template Toolkit can cache the results of template processing to make future processing faster.

By default the cache is not enabled. Use "tt_compile_dir" to enable it. Set this directive to the name of a directory where the UID that SVN::Web is being run as can create files.

For example:

   tt_compile_dir: /var/tmp/tt-cache

A literal "." and the UID of the process running SVN::Web will be appended to this string to generate the final directory name. For example, if SVN::Web is being run under UID 80 then the final directory name is /var/tmp/tt-cache.80. Since the cached templates are always created with mode 0600 this ensures that different users running SVN::Web can not overwrite one another's cached templates.

This directive has no default value. If it is not defined then no caching will take place.

Log message filters

Many of the templates shipped with SVN::Web include log messages from the repository. It's likely that these log messages contain e-mail addresses, links to other web sites, and other rich information.

The Template::Toolkit makes it possible to filter these messages through one or more plugins and/or filters that can recognise these and insert additional markup to make them active.

In SVN::Web this is accomplished using a Template::Toolkit MACRO called "log_msg". The trac templates define this in a template called _log_msg, which is included in the relevant templates by this line:

  [% PROCESS _log_msg %]

You may redefine this macro yourself to filter log messages through additional plugins depending on your requirements. As a MACRO this also has access to the template's variables, allowing you to easily specify different filters depending on the values of different variables (perhaps per-repository, or per-author filtering). See the _log_msg template included with this distribution for more details.

Time and date formatting

There are a number of places in the web interface where SVN::Web will display a timestamp from Subversion.

Internally, Subversion stores times in UTC. You may wish to show them in your local timezone (or some other timezone). You may also wish to change the formatting of the timestamp.

To do this use the "timezone" and "timedate_format" configuration options.

"timezone" takes one of three settings.

1.: If not set, or set to the empty string, SVN::Web will show all times in UTC. This is the default behaviour.
2.: If set to the string "local" then SVN::Web will adjust all timestamps to the web server's local timezone (which may not be the same timezone as the server that hosts the repository).
3.: If set to a timezone name, such as "BST" or "EST", then SVN::Web will adjust all timestamps to that timezone.

When displaying timestamps SVN::Web uses the POSIX "strftime()" function. You can change the format string that is provided, thereby changing how the timestamp is formatted. Use the "timedate_format" configuration directive for this.

The default value is:

  timedate_format: '%Y/%m/%d %H:%M:%S'

Using this format, a quarter past one in the afternoon on the 15th of May 2006 would appear as:

  2006/05/15 13:15:00

If instead that was:

  timedate_format: '%a. %b %d, %l:%M%p'

then the same timestamp would appear as:

  Mon. May 15, 1:15pm

Note that strftime(3) on different operating systems supports different format specifiers, so consult your system's strftime(3) manual page to see which specifiers are available.

Actions, action classes, and action options

Each action that SVN::Web can carry out is implemented as a class (see ``ACTIONS, SUBCLASSES, AND URLS'' for more). You can specify your own class for a particular action. This lets you implement your own actions, or override the behaviour of existing actions.

The complete list of actions is listed in the "actions" configuration directive.

If you delete items from this list then the corresponding action becomes unavailable. For example, if you would like to prevent people from retrieving an RSS feed of changes, just delete the "- rss" entry from the list.

To provide your own behaviour for standard actions just specify a different value for the "class" key. For example, to specify your own class that implements the "view" action;

  actions:
    ...
    view:
      class: My::View::Class
    ...

If you wish to implement your own action, give the action a name, add it to the "actions" list, and then specify the class that carries out the action.

For example, SVN::Web currently provides no action that generates ATOM feeds. If you implement this, you would write:

  actions:
    ...
    atom:
      class: My::Class::That::Implements::Atom
    ...

Please feel free to submit any classes that implement additional functionality back to the maintainers, so that they can be included in the distribution.

Actions may have configurable options specified in config.yaml under the "opts" key. Continuing the "annotate" example, the action may be written to provide basic output by default, but feature a "verbose" flag that you can enable globally. That would be configured like so:

  actions:
    ...
    annotate:
      class: My::Class::That::Implements::Annotate
      opts:
        verbose: 1
    ...

The documentation for each action should explain in more detail how it should be configured. See SVN::Web::action for more information about writing actions.

If an action is listed in "actions" and there is no corresponding "class" directive then SVN::Web takes the action name, converts the first character to uppercase, and then looks for an "SVN::Web::<Action>" package.

Action menu configuration

In the user interface the "action menu" is a list of actions that are valid in the current context. This menu is built up programmatically from additional metadata about each action included in the config file.

The metadata is written as a hash, with each key corresponding to a particular piece of metadata. The hash is rooted at the "action_menu" key.

A worked example may prove instructive. Here is the default entry for SVN::Web::RSS. This shows all the valid keys under "action_menu".

  rss:
    class: SVN::Web::RSS
    action_menu:
      show:
        - file
        - directory
      link_text: (rss)
      head_only: 1
      icon: /css/trac/feed-icon-16x16.png

The keys, and their meanings, are:

show

The contexts in which this action should appear in the action menu. Each SVN::Web action produces a result in a particular context. The valid contexts are:

file: The action is acting on a single file. E.g., SVN::Web::View or SVN::Web::Blame.
directory: The action is acting on a single directory. E.g., SVN::Web::Browse.
revision: The action is acting on a single revision. E.g., SVN::Web::Revision.

Valid values are any of the three items above, plus the special value "global", indicating that the action should always appear in the action menu.

In this example, the "rss" action is available when browsing directories and viewing files. It makes no sense to make the RSS action available when browsing an individual revision, so that is not listed as a valid context.

link_text

The text that should appear in the action menu for this item. This text is passed through the localisation system.

head_only

A boolean that indicates whether the action is always available in the listed contexts, or whether it should only appear when viewing the HEAD revision in a particular context.

In this example it makes no sense to clamp the RSS feed to a particular revision, so it is flagged as only being available when looking at the HEAD of a file or directory.

icon

The (relative) path to the icon to use for this menu item (if any).

For comparison, this is the recommended setting for SVN::Web::Checkout.

  checkout:
    class: SVN::Web::Checkout
    action_menu:
      show:
        - file
      link_text: (checkout)

This action is only valid when viewing files --- checking out a directory does not make sense. A file can be checked out at any revision, so "head_only" can be omitted ("head_only: 0" would have the same effect). And there is no icon for this action.

For details of how this information is used see the template/trac/_action_menu template.

The "action_menu" metadata is optional. Some actions might not merit a menu option (e.g., "diff" or "revision"), so those actions should not have "action_menu" metadata.

CGI class

SVN::Web can use a custom CGI class. By default SVN::Web will use CGI::Fast if it is installed, and fallback to using CGI otherwise.

Of course, if you have your own class that implements the CGI interface you may specify it here too.

  cgi_class: 'My::CGI::Subclass'

ACTIONS, SUBCLASSES, AND URLS

SVN::Web URLs are broken down in to four components.

  .../index.cgi/<repo>/<action>/<path>?<arguments>

  .../apache-handler/<repo>/<action>/<path>?<arguments>

repo: The repository the action will be performed on. SVN::Web can be configured to operate on multiple Subversion repositories.
action: The action that will be run.
path: The path within the <repository> that the action is performed on.
arguments: Any arguments that control the behaviour of the action.

Each action is implemented as a Perl module. By convention, each module carries out whatever processing is required by the action, and returns a reference to a hash of data that is used to fill out a "Template::Toolkit" template that displays the action's results.

The standard actions, and the Perl modules that implement them, are:

blame, SVN::Web::Blame: Shows the blame (also called annotation) information for a file. On a per line basis it shows the revision in which that line was last changed and the user that committed the change.
browse, SVN::Web::Browse: Shows the files and directories in a given repository path. This is the default command if no path is specified in the URL.
checkout, SVN::Web::Checkout: Returns the raw data for the file at a given repository path and revision.
diff, SVN::Web::Diff: Shows the difference between two revisions of the same file.
list, SVN::Web::List: Lists the available Subversion repositories. This is the default command if no repository is specified in the URL.
log, SVN::Web::Log: Shows log information (commit messages) for a given repository path.
revision, SVN::Web::Revision: Shows information about a specific repository revision.
rss, SVN::Web::RSS: Generates an RSS feed of changes to the repository path.
view, SVN::Web::View: Shows the commit message and file contents for a specific repository path and revision.

See the documentation for each of these modules for more information about the data that they provide to each template, and for information about customising the templates used for each module.

WEB SERVERS

This section explains how to configure some common webservers to run SVN::Web. In all cases, "/path/to/svnweb" in the examples is the directory you ran "svnweb-install" in, and contains config.yaml.

SVN::Web now uses Plack to provide connectivity to the web server. Previously a cgi, stand alone, fastcgi, mod_perl1 and a mod_perl2 interface was provided as part of this software. All of which have been removed and replaced by Plack. In doing so, Plack now will connect SVN::Web to all of the above, plus PSGI, nginx_perl and anything else cooked up in the future.

If you've configured a web server that isn't listed here for SVN::Web, please send in the instructions so they can be included in a future release.

plackup

"plackups" is a simple web server that can run SVN::Web stand alone, and is included and installed by Plack. It may be all you need to productively use SVN::Web without needing to install a larger server. To use it, run:

  plackup SVN-Web.psgi

See "perldoc plackup" for details about additional options you can use.

Apache as CGI (not recommended)

See Plack::Handler::CGI

Apache with mod_perl or mod_perl2

See Plack::Handler::Apache1 or Plack::Handler::Apache2 respectively.

Apache with FastCGI

See Plack::Handler::FCGI

IIS

For now this is probably broken.

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to "[email protected]", or through the web interface at <http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=SVN-Web>. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

AUTHORS

Chia-liang Kao "<[email protected]>"

Nik Clayton "<[email protected]>"

Dean Hamstead "<[email protected]>"

COPYRIGHT

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

See <http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html>