Installing Subversion on a cPanel Server

It should be easy right? Just “yum install subversion”.

Nope. You get this error message:

Error: Missing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 is needed by package

It’s not a problem in CentOS, no, it’s a restriction created by cPanel to control what is installed using yum.

Here’s what you do:

• Edit your “/etc/yum.conf” file.
• Remove “perl*” from the “exclude” line.
• Run your “yum install subversion”
• Add the “perl*” back to the “exclude” line in the yum file.

That’s it! It will install as expected.

Update

If you’re using CentOS4 you may get the following error when exporting:

[user@server ~]$ svn export http://server/svn/project/directory/filename
svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/project/!svn/vcc/default'
svn:
Cannot replace a directory from within

This is caused by a bug which was fixed and released in subversion version 1.2.0, however, RHEL4 (Redhat Enterprise Linux 4) and CentOS 4 use Subversion 1.1.4 from 2005 which doesn’t have this fix.

The solution is to install the latest version of SVN from a third party repository such as RPMForge:

wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

rpm -Uhv rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el4.rf.i386.rpm

Once RPMForge (and RPMForge extras) is setup, simply run:

yum install –enablerepo=rpmforge-extras subversion

That’s it!