Both the Apache httpd and svnserve Subversion servers provide support for high-level logging of Subversion operations. Configuring each of the server options to provide this level of logging is done differently, of course, but the output from each is designed to conform to a uniform syntax.

To enable high-level logging in svnserve, you need only use the --log-file command-line option when starting the server, passing as the value to the option the file to which svnserve should write its log output.

$ svnserve -d -r /path/to/repositories --log-file /var/log/svn.log

Enabling the same in Apache is a bit more involved, but is essentially an extension of Apache's stock log output configuration mechanisms—see the section called “Apache logging” for details.

The following is a list of Subversion action log messages produced by its high-level logging mechanism, followed by one or more examples of the log message as it appears in the log output.

As a convenience to administrators who wish to post-process their Subversion high-level logging output (perhaps for reporting or analysis purposes), Subversion source code distributions provide a Python module (located at tools/server-side/svn_server_log_parse.py) which can be used to parse Subversion's log output.