Update: Configuration of basic authentication is included now.

First, install subversion and the Apache library with the command

sudo apt-get install subversion libapache2-svn

Next, enter the Subversion/Apache configuration into the vhost.conf file of the respective domain, e.g. /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]/conf/vhost.conf. This file contains all the important Apache stuff for the subdomain.

<Location /svn>
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]/svn
# The following three lines allow anonymous read, but make
# committers authenticate themselves.
<LimitExcept GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
AuthType Basic
AuthName "SVN Authorization Realm"
AuthUserFile /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]/svn/svnAuthUsers.passwd
Require valid-user
</LimitExcept>
</Location >

What is left is to create an example repository, restart Apache

cd /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]
mkdir svn
svnadmin create svn/test
chown -R www-data:www-data svn/
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

and to test it from your home computer

svn co http://www.[DOMAIN NAME]/svn/test

To allow you – and only you – to commit new files, authentication has to be configured. Run the following command on the the server, using your local user name for convenience:

htpasswd -c /var/www/vhosts/[DOMAIN NAME]/svn/svnAuthUsers.passwd [USERNAME]

You will be prompted for a password. Commiting new files and directories should work now as well. And that’s pretty much it!

To allow only authenticated users to checkout the repository, remove both lines containing the “LimitExcept” from the vhost.conf file. Another excellent explanation of the setup process is to be found here.

In the follwing steps, I show you how to overcome the problem by creating a new user that has has the same user id but a different home directory. First, create the domain FOODOMAIN with ftp user FTPUSER in plesk as usual (insert the names that you want). Login onto the vserver via ssh. Let us first determine the user id of FTPUSER as described here (assume your FTPUSER=jack):

Issue the shell command:
cat /etc/passwd |grep 'jack'

This will show you a line similar to the following:
jack:x:10041:10001::/home/httpd/vhosts/example.com:/usr/local/psa/bin/chrootsh

The first number (after the 2nd colon : ) is 10041, so this is the UID of user jack.
You will need this in the 'useradd' lines since useradd wants a number for the UID.

Let us now create the user. As USERID insert the number from the last step, e.g.10041.

useradd -u USERID -o -g psacln -d /var/www/vhosts/FOODOMAIN/home -s /bin/bash SHELLUSER

Finally, we create the new home directory the user is actually allowed to write in.

cd /var/www/vhosts/FOODOMAIN
mkdir home
chown SHELLUSER: home

There you go, FOOUSER can now work in a nerdy fashion.

The problem here is that Plesk makes various assumptions about default directories, permissions and apache configuration. Let us assume you want to set up a wiki for the domain FOO.COM, the home of which is located at /var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM on your vserver. The ftp user for FOO.COM is called RICKY. Run the following commands as root (please adjust directories and version numbers):
wget http://static.moinmo.in/files/moin-1.6.3.tar.gz
tar -xvzf moin-1.6.3.tar.gz
cd moin-1.6.3
python setup.py install --prefix='/usr/local' --record=install.log

These are the instructions for Basic MoinMoin Installation. Note that there is a MoinMoin package for Dapper, but the latest version is 1.5.9. The installation has been succesful if entering “import MoinMoin” in python gives no error message. We will now create a “wiki instance”, which is a single wiki for a particular domain.

Typically, the documents delivered by the webserver are located at /var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/httpdocs. We don’t want to install the instance here since anybody would be able to download all wiki data. Instead, we put the data directly to /var/www/vhosts/WIKINAME (please select any WIKINAME). Go to the domain root and open and create the file createInstance.sh with an editor of your choice (I prefer emacs):

cd /var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/
emacs createInstance.sh

Paste in the script shown here and replace the following entries:

SHARE=/usr/local/share/moin
USER=RICKY
GROUP=psacln

By the way, psacln is the default group used for ftp users by Plesk. Create the instance by hitting

chmod +x createInstance.sh
./createInstance.sh WIKINAME

We will now adjust the wiki configuration files for use with our local directory structure and wiki name. First, open the file /var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/WIKINAME/wikiconfig.py and replace the line data_dir = './data/' with data_dir = '/var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/WIKINAME/data/' and replace data_underlay_dir = './underlay/' with data_underlay_dir = '/var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/WIKINAME/underlay/'. Please take care that the indentation of these lines stays like it is and no TAB is inserted.

Now go to the directory /var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/cgi-bin, which Plesk created by default. Enter

cp /usr/local/share/moin/server/moin.cgi .
chmod 751 moin.cgi
emacs moin.cgi

In your editor, replace the line sys.path.insert(0, '/path/to/wikiconfig') with sys.path.insert(0, '/var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/WIKINAME').

The only thing which is left to do, is to tell the webserver where it can find the static files for the wiki. WIth plask, you may never alter http.conf or http.include files, as these changes are overwritten next time you change anything using the plesk webinterface. Instead, you will have to edit the file /var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/vhost.conf! Paste the following into that file (maybe change 163 to your version number)


alias /moin_static163 "/usr/local/share/moin/htdocs"
<Directory /usr/local/share/moin/htdocs>
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>

Restart the webserver with

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If you have done everything right, you should now be able to access your wiki under the domain FOO.COM/cgi-bin/moin.cgi. Voilá! Further configuration is needed, but your wiki is up and running right now. If your wiki is too slow, you might want to consider switching to mod_python which i will explain in the sometime. You can create a nicer alias such as FOO.COM/WIKI for the wiki by adding following line to vhosts.conf

ScriptAlias /WIKI "/var/www/vhosts/FOO.COM/cgi-bin/moin.cgi".