Re: svnserve as a service

[David Rothenberger <daveroth at acm dot org>]

On 10/15/2010 5:43 AM, someone wrote:
> I tried to run svnserve as a windows service using the --service
> option, as explained in the SVN book. The service didn't start,
> reporting error 1053 instead. After a lot of googling and MSDN KB
> reading, I finally realised that it wasn't a service or local account
> rights problem, no, the version of svnserve shipped with cygwin
> simply doesn't support the --service option!
> 
> Is this intended? If so, why? What about a proper error message
> instead of that weird timeout error (which pops up instantly)? Is it
> a stupid idea to create and start a windows service from cygwin? I
> can't see the reason.

The --service option is only available in the native Windows port of
svnserve. "svnserve --service" does produce a message that the option
isn't valid. The error and timeout you got are from the Windows service
you created, not svnserve itself.

It is reasonable to use the Cygwin svnserve for a Windows service.
You'll need to use the Cygwin service wrapper cygrunsrv to do it. I just
setup a test one and it worked fine, using this command:

 % cygrunsrv --install svnserve \
     --path /usr/bin/svnserve \
     --args '-d --foreground -r /c/temp/svn-test' \
     --dep Tcpip

I also used the --user switch to cygrunsrv to install it as myself. The
default is to run the service as SYSTEM. You'd probably need to be
pretty careful with the ACLs for your repository if you want to run it
as SYSTEM, although I imagine you could get it to work.

I build the Cygwin subversion package so it directly uses as little of
the Windows API as possible. I may look into enabling the --service
option in a future release, but it's low on my list given there's a
perfectly acceptable Cygwin-standard way to do this.

-- 
David Rothenberger  ----  daveroth@acm.org

boy, n:
        A noise with dirt on it.

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