A friend and a colleague asked me to help him on setting up SVN with apache authentication, after a little bit of googling I find a nice-easy-to-use-howto at archlinux website., which covers the SVN + Apache Basic Authentication, but here I'll talk about the Digest Authentication since it is more secure than apache basic authentication.

NOTE: I'm using Archlinux

1- Install apache webserver and subversion server "SVN" on your distro:

pacman -S apache subversion

2- Load the needed modules for apache:
vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and add this 2 lines

LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so

also make sure that you have auth_digest and dav_module modules are loaded

3- Make the SVN repositories directory:

mkdir -p /home/svn/repositories

4- Force apache to redirect any request to SSL:
vim /etc/apache/conf/httpd.conf and add this lines

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [R,L]

5- Create your SSL certification files and include them into httpd.conf in archlinux case do what is written /etc/httpd/conf/mod_ssl.txt

6- Create subversion configurations file:
vim /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-svn.conf and add the following lines

<Location /svn>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /home/svn/repositories
AuthzSVNAccessFile /home/svn/.svn-policy-file
AuthName "SVN"
AuthType Digest
AuthDigestProvider file
AuthUserFile /home/svn/.svn-digest-file
Satisfy Any
Require valid-user
</Location>

7- Create apache digest access file:
this file will contain the username , realm and password for the apache users

htdigest -c /home/svn/.svn-digest-file SVN username

to add more users remove "-c" option from the command line.

NOTE: the realm in that case is SVN

8- Include the new configurations into apache configurations:
vim /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and include the new file " in case of archlinux uncomment the SSL file too

Include /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf
Include /tc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-svn.conf

9- Create the policy file:
vim /home/svn/.svn-policy-file and add this lines

[/]
* = r
[test:/]
username = rw

in that file we set the policy for each project to r " read " or w " write " or rw for the users. the * means anyone can read the SVN repository but not commit. if you want to disable anonymous access just remove the 1st 2 lines.

10- Create the repository:

svnadmin create /home/svn/repositories/test

11- Change owner of the repositories to the apache user:

chown -R nobody.nobody /home/svn/repositories/test

NOTE: in archlinux the user that running apache is nobody, in debian based distro it is www-data make sure to chown the directories to the actual user that running apache.

12- Create your development tree:

mkdir branches tags trunk

13- Import your application:
go to your application path and start importing

svn import -m "1st revision" https://localhost/svn/test

and you are done, I hope it was useful