How to install a stand-alone SVN Server on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Introduction

I have a number of small projects lying around, to which I would like to bring some order. My main working machine is the stationary Mac, but I also use my Windows laptop quite often (when I am on the road). So I decided to have the main repository on the Mac (backed up using TimeMachine), and then have Subversion (SVN) take care of the version control. Mac OS X 10.6 comes with SVN pre-installed out of the box. But it is preconfigured to run locally only. What I want to do is to make the repository available on the network, so that I can check the projects in and out also from my Windows laptop. To accomplish this, there are mainly two paths to go down:

• Either you configure the Apache web server to expose the SVN repository
• Or you configure SVN directly using the launch daemon

Personally, I don't use the built in apache web server for anything. So, I have not started it anyway. For that reason I decided to go for the 2nd approach, which starts the stand-alone SVN server on the Mac.