Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) and SVN (1.6.2)

Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) and SVN (1.6.2)

 

Today I spent a few hours trying to figure out why Eclipse was unable to connect to my locally running Subversion server. I was annoyed especially because Xcode and Terminal were not having any issues.

Some background information.
- SVN is running as a daemon locally. It gets started by:
svnserve -d –listen-host localhost -r /Library/Subversion/Repository

- trying to checkout stuff using the command below via Terminal works fine
svn co svn://localhost/Project1/trunk WorkingDirName

- trying to browse the svn repository from within Eclipse 3.5 Galileo using either Subclipse or Subversive always ends up with:
svn: connection refused by the server

I tried many things but none of them helped. I googled but failed to find something relevant. Just before giving up I thought I would check what ports were open on my machine, maybe there was some conflict. There was no conflict but…
netstat -anp TCP | grep LISTEN
returned this:
tcp6       0      0  ::1.3690               *.*                    LISTEN
That’s when it dawned on me: the svnserve was binding an IPV6 address and Eclipse could not handle that!

Solution:
ps -ef | grep svnserve
kill -9 (where proc_id is the process id of your svnserve, the second number on the line)
svnserve -d –listen-host 127.0.0.1 -r /Library/Subversion/Repository/ (or wherever you’ve placed your Repository)

Done! Now svnserve is bound to an IPV4 and Eclipse can play nice too.

Cheers…

p.s. please let me know if this worked with other Mac OS / SVN versions too