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2.3 Creating a repository

This section describes how to set up a CVS repository for any sort of access method. After completing the setup described in this section, you should be able to access your CVS repository immediately via the local access or remote shell methods. For more information on setting up remote access to the repository you create in this section, please see section 2.4 Remote repositories and section 17 The CVS server.

To set up a CVS repository, first choose the machine and disk on which you want to store the revision history of the source files. CPU and memory requirements are modest, so most machines should be adequate. For details see section 17.7 Server requirements.

The repository should be accessible (directly or via a networked file system) from all machines which want to use CVS in server or local mode; the client machines need not have any access to it other than via the CVS protocol. It is not possible to use CVS to read from a repository which one only has read access to; CVS needs to be able to create lock files (see section 10.5 Several developers simultaneously attempting to run CVS).

To create a repository, run the cvs init command. It will set up an empty repository in the CVS root specified in the usual way (see section 2 The Repository). For example,

$ cvs -d /usr/local/cvsroot init

cvs init is careful to never overwrite any existing files in the repository, so no harm is done if you run cvs init on an already set-up repository.

cvs init will enable history logging; if you don't want that, remove the history file after running cvs init. See section B.9 The history file.