In a previous article on subversion I mentioned the use of the svnindex.xsl file to style the repository listing. This file was placed in the root of "yourdomain.com" which was a level above the svn repositories.

However there may arise a situation such as outlined in last weeks posting where you need to host the xslt files from within a repository. Or you may just decide you want to simply because. Not only is this really simple to do, it allows us to version control the svnindex file itself.

Step 1: Create Repository

Lets create a dedicated repository for the svnindex.xml and svnindex.css files. I named my repo "svnstyling". Import the two files into the repo.

Step 2: Call SVNIndexXSLT

Next we set the svnindexxslt directive in the location section of our vhost and restart apache.

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerName svn.yourdomain.com

 <Location />
 DAV svn
 SVNParentPath "C:/svn_repository/"
 SVNListParentPath on
 SVNIndexXSLT "/svnstyling/svnindex.xsl"
 ---snip---
 </Location>

</VirtualHost>

Step 3: Set the mime types

Because we are serving the xsl and css files directly from a subversion repository we need to define the mime types for each file. For the xsl file set the mimetype to "test/xml" and for the css file set the mimetype to "text/css".

$ svn propset svn:mime-type text/xml svnindex.xml
$ svn propset svn:mime-type text/css svnindex.css

That's it. Now our repositories have their own dedicated vhost while keeping their nice xslt styling and as a bonus the xsl and associated files are now themselves version controlled.