rmoff

September 21, 2010

TortoiseSVN doesn’t prompt for authentication

Filed under: svn — rmoff @ 13:36

Here’s one in the series of stupid things I’ve done but which Google has thrown no answers, so I post it here to help out fellow idiots.

Today’s episode involves our SCM tool, TortoiseSVN. I’d been happily using it for over a year, when suddenly I couldn’t commit any more.
I could browse and checkout to my heart’s content, but when I tried to commit, boom:

Commit failed (details follow):
Authorization failed

The odd thing was that I wasn’t being prompted to login, i.e. I wasn’t authenticating, so how could I give it my credentials with which to authorise??

I went through and cleared out all authentication data, even digging around in Documents and Settings app data to flush it all out. Nothing. No prompt when I went to the repo, and thus no authorisation to commit my changes.

We’re using SVN on Windows via Apache, with Windows Domain authentication.

I rebooted. I reinstalled. I installed an older version of the client. No dice. I whipped out Google – TortoiseSVN doesn’t ask for authentication. Nothing.

And most puzzling of all was that it was just me, no-one else using the SVN repo had the problem.

I fired up a second PC that I’d used a few months ago, and went to TortoiseSVN – and got prompted for my credentials. So then I looked a bit closer. And a bit closer still. Bingo.

See if you can spot the difference:

For some reason I’d been merrily connecting using the svn:// protocol, which worked for read-only (I think our SVN server’s configured for anonymous read-only), but then barfed on write-attempts.

Using https:// protocol, correctly prompted me to authenticate on connection.

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