Joel Bastos

Joel Bastos

Engineer with a keen interest in all things infrastructure, geek by definition and curious by nature

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Server side SVN + SSH logging

less than 1 minute read

logs

After searching the interwebs for a method on obtaining server side logging capability on SVN over SSH with no success, I decided to do some reverse engineering on how SVN works hopping to get it logging every user action on each repository.

What I’ve found is that every client SVN call to the server via SSH launches svnserve, and indeed there is a svnserve.conf config file on every repository, unfortunately with no log flag available. Nontheless the svnserve binary accepts the desired log flag, so let’s get creative…

[root@svn-server ~]# mkdir /var/log/svn/

[root@svn-server ~]# whereis svnserve
svnserve: /usr/bin/svnserve 

[root@svn-server ~]# mv /usr/bin/svnserve /usr/bin/svnserve.bin 

[root@svn-server ~]# cat /usr/bin/svnserve
/usr/bin/svnserve.bin --log-file /var/log/svn/svnserve_`id -u`.log $1 

[root@svn-server ~]# chmod +x  /usr/bin/svnserve

There, you got logging!

What some log rotating? Sure, here you go:

[root@svn-server ~]# cat /etc/logrotate.d/svn
/var/log/svn/svnserve*.log {
        daily
        rotate 365
        missingok
        notifempty
        lastaction
                /bin/chown root.root /var/log/svn/svnserve*.log.* > /dev/null &
                /bin/chmod 600 /var/log/svn/svnserve*.log.* > /dev/null &
        endscript
}

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