CODEWITHSUNDEEP
svn
brian-d
brian-d

Reputation: 803

svn copy causes "...(403 Forbidden) in reponse to PROPFIND", other actions work

Just for a short bit of background, the reason I'm tracking this particular subversion oddity down is because I found it troubleshooting our new Maven setup (specifically the release plugin). release:prepare gives me the same error buried in a stack trace.

Executing this command...
svn copy http://[server]/svn/tran1/myproject/trunk http://[server]/svn/tran1/myproject/tags/testtag

...gives me the following error:
svn: Server sent unexpected return value (403 Forbidden) in response to PROPFIND request for '/svn/tran1'

I thought this might be an authentication issue, but I'm able to do pretty much every other subversion thing I can think of. Checkout, add, commit and update all work from the command line. And here's where it gets really weird... I can create branches using Eclipse's Subclipse plugin. This might not be all that strange if Eclipse isn't actually doing an svn copy.

tran1 also has a sibling subversion repository next to it. The copy command works fine there.

The URL it's trying to get permission for also looks wrong. It's asking about /svn/tran1, when the permissions are set up one level deeper /svn/tran1/myproject/

Any ideas what might be causing my error? Thanks.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 10837

Answers (3)

Danny Schoemann
Danny Schoemann

Reputation: 1350

After hours of trying to solve this, my boss finally worked it out.

I'll be as specific as possible, for the sake of newbies (like myself).

The short story:

The httpd.conf was missing COPY in the section.

Solution:

vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Look for:

<Limit GET PUT PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT MKACTIVITY CHECKOUT DELETE PROPPATCH MKCOL MERGE COPY>
    Require valid-user
</Limit>

If COPY is not on the list, then add it.

Save your edited file.

Restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Upvotes: 1

Zac Thompson
Zac Thompson

Reputation: 12675

When I've seen this before, it comes down to Apache httpd configuration. A 403 should correspond to an error in the logs for the server. That should point you in the direction of the root cause.

Upvotes: 0

Wim Coenen
Wim Coenen

Reputation: 66733

I vaguely remember encountering the same problem. I believe the problem turned out to be that you need at least read access to all parent folders up to the root of the repository in order to use the svn copy operation.

Upvotes: 8

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