display web contents from svn repository

[Marco Asa <ma...@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I set up a combined svn server / web server where the latter displays
contents taken directly from one of the repositories. It runs fine but
I would like to make it work a bit more efficiently.

At the moment it works like this:
1) Both the svn repository and one checkout of it in "/example" are
hosted on the same machine
2) the svn repository folder  is monitored for changes by an incron job
3) when a file modification is made to the repository (by a commit for
instance), incron triggers svn update /example
4) the webserver points to /example and displays /example/index.html

My two questions are the following
a) can I avoid the checkout altogheter and save disk space? I.e.can I
configure the svn server so that I could take html pages and related
images directly from the HEAD revision?
b) If not, I would like to improve step 3). At the moment svn update
is called tens of times for each commit (any kind of modification
triggers it as I am looking at the whole folder). What would be a good
file to monitor with incron in the repository that will always be
modified by a new commit?

Thanks for your attention,
-- 
Asa Marco <ma...@gmail.com> 朝

Re: display web contents from svn repository

[Daniel Sahlberg <da...@gmail.com>]

Den mån 24 apr. 2023 kl 20:16 skrev Marco Asa <ma...@gmail.com>:

> Nice, I was not aware of hooks and post-commit would work very nicely
> for the pourpose. I still had to make it work in a convoluted way
> since I deployed the svm server manager in an isolated container and
> the post-commit hook could not access directly the checkout that i
> need to update. Still, I could easily exploit the hook to write date
> and revision number in a text file accessible to both the container
> and the host; this file became my target to monitor with incron which
> is now triggered only once per commit.
>

Good to hear, thank you for reporting back on the mailing list!

Kind regards,
Daniel

Re: display web contents from svn repository

[Marco Asa <ma...@gmail.com>]

Hello Daniel,

thanks for the answer,

>
> If the SVN repository is available over http/https, then it should be possible to configure mod_rewrite so that any access to the web server is redirected to the Subversion server.
>

Unfortunately this is not my case but I was not much optimistic on this point

> Even if you find such a file, there is always a risk a future version of Subversion accesses the repository differently making this a fragile solution. It is probably better to look at a post-commit repository hook, see the SVN book [1]. The hook should trigger only once and only after completion of commits.

Nice, I was not aware of hooks and post-commit would work very nicely
for the pourpose. I still had to make it work in a convoluted way
since I deployed the svm server manager in an isolated container and
the post-commit hook could not access directly the checkout that i
need to update. Still, I could easily exploit the hook to write date
and revision number in a text file accessible to both the container
and the host; this file became my target to monitor with incron which
is now triggered only once per commit.

Thanks again,
--
Marco Asa

Re: display web contents from svn repository

[Daniel Sahlberg <da...@gmail.com>]

Den mån 24 apr. 2023 kl 13:19 skrev Marco Asa <ma...@gmail.com>:

> Hello,
>
> I set up a combined svn server / web server where the latter displays
> contents taken directly from one of the repositories. It runs fine but
> I would like to make it work a bit more efficiently.
>
> At the moment it works like this:
> 1) Both the svn repository and one checkout of it in "/example" are
> hosted on the same machine
> 2) the svn repository folder  is monitored for changes by an incron job
> 3) when a file modification is made to the repository (by a commit for
> instance), incron triggers svn update /example
> 4) the webserver points to /example and displays /example/index.html
>
> My two questions are the following
> a) can I avoid the checkout altogheter and save disk space? I.e.can I
> configure the svn server so that I could take html pages and related
> images directly from the HEAD revision?
>

If the SVN repository is available over http/https, then it should be
possible to configure mod_rewrite so that any access to the web server is
redirected to the Subversion server.

For example, the Subversion projects front page is available directly from
SVN here:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/site/publish/index.html

(It looks like crap, since the page require the use of server side includes
to render some part of the page including a lot of the page structure).

I would assume serving the page this way would require a lot more CPU
cycles compared to serving it directly from the file system so depending on
your use case it might not be feasible.


> b) If not, I would like to improve step 3). At the moment svn update
> is called tens of times for each commit (any kind of modification
> triggers it as I am looking at the whole folder). What would be a good
> file to monitor with incron in the repository that will always be
> modified by a new commit?
>

Even if you find such a file, there is always a risk a future version of
Subversion accesses the repository differently making this a fragile
solution. It is probably better to look at a post-commit repository hook,
see the SVN book [1]. The hook should trigger only once and only after
completion of commits. I assume (although I never investigated) that the
Subversion website is handled this way - on updates we just commit to
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/site/publish/ and it appears
within a moment on https://subversion.apache.org/.

I hope it works out for you!

Kind regards,
Daniel Sahlberg

[1] https://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.7/svn.ref.reposhooks.post-commit.html



> Thanks for your attention,
> --
> Asa Marco <ma...@gmail.com> 朝
>