How can I cache a Subversion password on a server, without storing it in unencrypted form?

Posted by Zilk on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Zilk
Published on 2011-08-15T23:58:20Z Indexed on 2012/09/05 3:40 UTC
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My Subversion server only provides access via HTTPS; support for svn+ssh has been dropped because we wanted to avoid creating system users on that machine just for SVN access. Now I'm trying to provide a way for users to cache their passwords for a while, without leaving them stored on the filesystem in unencrypted form.

This is no problem for Gnome or KDE users, because they can use gnome-keyring and kwallet, respectively. IIRC, TortoiseSVN has a similar caching mechanism, too. But what about users on a non-GUI system?

Some context: in this case, we have a development/testing server where one project has been checked out into the Apache htdocs directory. Development for this project is almost complete, and only minor text/layout changes are performed directly on this server. Nevertheless, the changes should be checked into the repository. There's no kwallet and no gnome-keyring on this system, and the ssh-agent can't help because the repository is accessed via https instead of svn+ssh.

As far as I know, that leaves them the choice of entering the password every time they talk to the SVN server, or storing it in an insecure way.

Is there any way to get something like what gnome-keyring and kwallet provide in a non-GUI environment?

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