How to remove warning about storing unencrypted password after committing file in svn

Question

Every time I commit a file in svn I get the following message:

ATTENTION! Your password for authentication realm:

http://domainname.com:80 “domainname.com”

can only be stored to disk unencrypted! You are advised to configure your system so that Subversion can store passwords encrypted, if possible. See the documentation for details. You can avoid future appearances of this warning by setting the value of the 'store-plaintext-passwords' option to either 'yes' or 'no' in '/root/.subversion/servers'.

---

Store password unencrypted (yes/no)? no

I don't want this authentication; how can I get rid of this warning?

Answer 1

You are not storing the password in Subversion because you answered no to the question whether or not you want to store this password.

I take it you want to eliminate this error warning message entirely. There are two ways to handle that:

• The easy, but hard way: You can specify svn --no-auth-cache each and every time you a Subversion command. It's easy to do since it requires no real action on your part. It's hard because you have to do this almost every time you use a Subversion command (especially one that touches the repository like checkout and commit).

• The hard, but easy way: You can modify your user's Subversion configuration not to ask if you want to store this information. (BTW, why are you running as root? You like living life on the edge? Better off running as a user and configure sudo to allow you to do the root stuff you need. That way, you can track who's doing what, and you don't do something that could accidentally bring the server down. In fact, many Unix/Linux systems by default no longer allow a user to sign in as root. You have to do sudo). This is hard because you have to do something, but easy because once you do it, you don't have to do anything again.

You have the name of the file that you need to edit (/root/.subversion/servers). Look for the [global] section and look for the line # store-passwords = no and remove the # from the beginning of the line. You can also do the same for the # store-plaintext-passwords = no line and the # store-auth-cred = no line. While, you're at it, you can also delete the files under the auth directory which is where Subversion stores its credentials. This will completely eliminate already stored passwords. More information can be found in the on line Red Bean Subversion manual.

Now, when you do a Subversion command that touches the repository, it'll ask you for a user name and password and won't ask if you want to store them.