Installing the Subversion Client with SSL Support on Linux

Today I needed to take a Red Hat Linux box and get the Subversion client running on it so I could check out some source from a secure repository. Initially, building and installing Subversion was a snap using their latest tarball. However, all it took was an attempt to check out the source to see that my job was not quite done. After trying to run a command like the following:

1. svn co https://www.example.com/svn/trunk/source 

I got the following error:

1. svn: SSL is not supported

Luckily it only took a quick Google search to find the source of my problem. I needed to compile Subversion against a version of neon that had SSL enabled.

So here's what I did. I downloaded the version of neon that is recommended by Subversion (since the latest version is apparently a little too recent to work with the latest version of Subversion). Then I did the typical ./configure, make, make install routine, with the following exception:

1. ./configure --with-ssl

By adding the --with-ssl switch, I've ensured that neon will be compiled with SSL support turned on.

Then, I did a make clean on my previous Subversion compilation and reconfigured it to use the version of neon that I had just compiled, like so:

1. ./configure --with-neon=/usr/local/ 

Note that I pointed to /usr/local/ because of another Subversion recommendation.

After reconfiguring, compiling and installing, I now have the Subversion client running on my Linux machine with SSL support enabled.