On a current project we wanted to restrict a vendor’s access to our SVN to a specific directory. We host our SVN repository on Dreamhost because they make it easy to administer and give you an F ton of space. Their SVN user creation system doesn’t let you setup any specific access control per user. Ben found this great link that describes how this is accomplished with SVN.

How you do this on Dreamhost is to first create all the users you’re going to need, regardless of access level. Then you log into your Dreamhost account by ftp or ssh. Lets say your repo is called myrepo. /svn/myrepo.access is what you want to edit. Here’s an example of what you might put in there:

[/]
robert = rw
ben = rw

[/Site]
vendor = rw


This would give vendor only access to the /Site subdirectory of your repo. Thus, they would access your repo by going to http://yourdomain.com/myrepo/Site. If you update this repo’s users via the control panel, though, this will be overwritten and vendor will get access to the root.