CVS has become the version control system of choice for many organisations. It has become the de-facto VCS within the open source domain, due to its simplicity and the fact that it is “free”. CVS clients are available on many platforms, and the CVS server can be accessed in client server mode, thus increasing the flexibility of this popular tool.
To setup a CVS server on a Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, RedHat 6.2, 7.0, 7.1 follow these instructions.
As root:
(/usr/sbin/)groupadd cvs
mkdir /usr/local/repository (or whatever directory you want)
cvs -d /usr/local/repository init
cd /usr/local/repository
chmod g+w .
chgrp -R cvs .
Modifty /etc/services to have the following line: cvspserver 2401/tcp
Modify /etc/inetd.conf by adding the line: cvspserver stream tcp nowait root /usr/bin/cvs cvs --allow-root=/usr/local/repository -f pserver
NB For newer distributions like Mandrake 8.0 and Red Hat 7.2 use xinetd. The involves creating a file called cvspserver shown below and place it in /etc/xinetd.d/
/etc/init.d/inet restart or /etc/rc.d/init.d/inet restart
or /etc/init.d/xinedt restart
configure /etc/cvs/cvs.conf to point at the repository /usr/local/repository
Download the jcvs client from "http://www.jcvs.org/"
To add a user add then as a linux account user and make sure that the cvs group is add to thier list of groups
To anonymous browse the CVS repository from a web browser it is well worth setting up viewcvs
service cvspserver
{
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
user = root
server = /usr/bin/cvs
server_args = --allow-root=/usr/local/repository -f pserver
}
Download ViewCVS from http://viewcvs.sourceforge.net/, version 0.7
Follow the README
This involves extracting the archive and running the sh script viewcvs-intall (as root), accept the defaults.
cd to /usr/local/viewcvs-dev and modify the viewcvs.conf file (see mine below)
cp cgi/cvsview.cgi to the cgi-bin directory (I couldn't get symbolic links to work) of your webserver and start browsing and change the group to cvs so that it can have write access to the cvs repository
There are a range of CVS clients and addons and comprehensive list can be found here. However the one of particular note is TortoiseCVS which intergrates into Windows Explorer (be sure to read the FAQs before setting this up)