Go to the command prompt and find your Apache installation, and the find the Apache binary files – on my Windows server it’s here:

C:\Program Files\xampp\apache\bin\

If you look in this folder, you should be able to see a file called: htpasswd.exe . That’s the file we’re going to use to generate our Subversion username / password combo. Now, assuming that your XAMPP install is similar to mine, you should have a \conf\ folder located at the same level as the \bin\ folder :

C:\Program Files\xampp\apache\bin\

C:\Program Files\xampp\apache\conf\

If you look in this folder, you “may” have a file called svnusers.conf – this is where the Subversion usernames / passwords are stored.

Assuming that’s the case, and you are still in your \bin\ folder, issue the following command:

htpasswd -m ..\conf\svnusers.conf username 

(replacing username with your desired username of course…)

You will be asked to enter a password twice, do this and your Subversion user should be added into svnusers.conf for you. Now, assuming that that was successful, you need to edit svnaccess.conf to give the correct permissions to your new user.

For those of you wondering where svnaccess.conf is located – it should be in the same folder as svnusers.conf. Edit svnaccess.conf using a text editor (Notepad++ or Textpad are great editors that I highly recommend!)

You should see something looking a bit like this:

[groups]
admins = User1, User2
ourdevelopers = User3, User4

[/]
#give admins read / write access to all repositories
@admins = rw
@ourdevelopers = r 

This should be fairly self explanatory, but just for completeness, you need to add your user to a group, and then give that group appropriate permissions to your repositories – such as rw (read write).

That’s it! Your new user should be added to your Windows Subversion server.