Source control is off course an essential part of the development process and Subversion is an excellent system for that purpose. In the past, installation of subversion was a bit complicated because it involved several steps, an Apache webserver and not-so-accessible user management and repository configuration. However, nowadays installation and management can’t be easier, on whatever platform you are either with Collabnet Subversion Edge or with VisualSVN Server.
For example, for Windows, download the excellent VisualSVN Server. Via a windows installer, an HTTP accessible subversion server is installed with a local management console (see image) for repository and user management. It’s up and running within 5 minutes. And the upgrades as just as simple as installing the new version.
Another option is to use Collabnet Subversion Edge. It’s available for Windows and RedHat (and thus also for Oracle Enterprise Linux). Installation on Linux is as simple as possible: untar the download, make sure JAVA_HOME is pointing to Java 6 and then run <install dir>/csvn/bin/csvn start. You access the web management console (see image) at localhost:3343 to manage the server, users, repositories and upgrades. One of the nice things is that it also includes ViewVc that provides a much more functional browser access. In case you don’t like all this fancy stuff, it als allows to install only the svn server; but why would you want that :-o?
