tortoisesvn unable to connect to repository

svn tortoisesvn collabnet subversion-edge
Kevin picture Kevin · Jun 27, 2017 · Viewed 10.2k times · Source

I am embarrassed to ask this question because of my knowledge and past experience and because of the popularity of the question. But I'm so frustrated I'm hoping someone can help me. I've spent hours on this already. I've searched the net, searched these forums, and read some documentation.

I am trying to get my TortoiseSVN client to work with my Collabnet Subversion Edge again after a few years of not doing any programming development. Everything runs on one Windows machine.

The Apache server and subversion server are both running (apparently fine), and I can easily access all my repositories with the two http: links on the Edge administration page. (https://host/svn and https://host/viewvc).

I have checked the httpd.conf files, and all the pathnames to the repositories seem to be correct. (Edge writes them out from the browser admin page.)

If I use a file:///xxx URL in Tortoise, I can see my repositories just fine, so they are well formed and not corrupted.

But the Tortoise client won't connect to the subversion server, no matter what syntax I try. I get a series of variations of the usual messages about not being able to connect to the URL, to the host, or to a repository, or whatever. The messages vary a bit depending on what I enter in the search bar.

The most popular messages are 

(for svn://myhostname/myrep) "No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it."

(for http://myhostname/myrep) "Unable to connect to a repository at URL xxx"

I've also cleared the Saved Data caches in TSVN where they seemed appropriate.

The frustrating thing was that all this software worked for a year or two in the past. I am hoping that someone can give me a few command lines to type, or a few files to check to get me going again. The only that has changed since everything worked was that I changed to a bigger disk drive, and changed the location of the repositories. Nothing else at all.

Thank you. Here's hoping...

Answer

bahrep picture bahrep · Jun 27, 2017

Check proxy settings in TortoiseSVN, Windows Firewall and your antivirus on the workstation. Check that the URL to the repositories is correct, too. It has to look like https://svn.example.com/svn/RepositoryName.

Several (possibly) related comments:

  • You must use HTTP(S) URL to address the repositories. SVN Edge does not support svnserve (svn://). It makes repositories available via HTTP(S) using Apache HTTP Server (mod_dav_svn).
  • Do not put your repositories and working copies to Dropbox. You should not use such services to store or backup live SVN repositories. Subversion repositories use flat file database system on disk and the services such as Dropbox interfere with file operations performed by SVN internally. This will cause various problems with the repositories and may also cause data loss.
  • When you use file:// access schema you don't even contact the server -- SVN client access the repository directly on filesystem.

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