Is Warehouse worth its $30?

Posted by yrashk

As you may know, nice Warehouse subversion browser was released recently. While being not a hosted service, it is a downloadable Rails application that is not free (per-domain license costs $30). I’ve decided to spend that money while reorganizing my VERBDEV server structure completely.

If you feel you would like to sponsor further application development, you should definitely pay guys for their job. If you expect to get absolutely stable and easily configurable application for your money, then try to wait for something more mature.

Few tips for those who have decided to try Warehouse now.

1. You can configure your Apache2 using this example (it is not perfect but it works):


<Proxy balancer://warehouse>
  # cluster member 1
  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3000
  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3001
</Proxy>

NameVirtualHost *:80

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerName svn.verbdev.com
 <Location />
              DAV svn

              # any "/foo" URL will map to a repository /var/repos/foo
              SVNParentPath /var/repos/

              # try anonymous access first, resort to real
              # authentication if necessary.
              Satisfy Any
              Require valid-user

              AuthzSVNAccessFile /var/warehouse-1.0.4/config/access.conf

              # how to authenticate a user
              AuthType Basic
              AuthName "Subversion repository" 
              AuthUserFile /var/warehouse-1.0.4/config/htpasswd.conf

 </Location>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin yrashk@verbdev.com
  ServerName dev.verbdev.com
  ServerAlias *.dev.verbdev.com
  ProxyPass / balancer://warehouse/
</VirtualHost>

2. Don’t expect that your access configuration will be delivered automatically from the very start. Pay attention to this documentation bit

3. You will need to install post-commit hooks in order to browse up-to-date repositories

4. Do not expect that it will tune your svnserve configuration. At least I haven’t found it at a brief look into. All this stuff is for subversion over http.

5. If you will experience problems running rake warehouse:build_config CONFIG=config/access.conf, try using this patch

6. You have a chance to experience some level uncertainty when adding/removing permissions: http://forum.activereload.net/forums/8/topics/154

7. You will be able to find few minor typos

As a conclusion: I’d rather buy this piece of software (and I actually did), as a kind of sponsorship for further development. If you hate rough edges, wait a bit.