Installing the Subversion client on a CentOS WHM / cPanel VPS

First published on July 3, 2010

If you’re semi-familiar with CentOS (a type of Linux operating system), you probably know about the package installer yum. When it’s working great, it not only installs and updates packages but also takes care of dependencies.

Installing a Subversion (SVN) client on a CentOS server should be as simple as running the command “yum install subversion”. Unfortunately, I recently ran into a problem on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting account where that simple yum command yielded the error:

Error: Missing Dependency: perl(URI) >= 1.17 is needed by package subversion

A few of the typical troubleshooting steps might be to try to run “yum install perl-uri” (which might tell you that “perl-uri” is not available), or to run the command “yum clean all” (hoping to clear some outdated cache), or to start fiddling with the repositories and their settings in /etc/yum.repos.d (hoping that the machine was configured incorrectly). You might also consider just manually downloading and installing perl-uri. In my case, however, the simple problem was that yum was being prevented from doing anything with perl-related packages. The top of the main yum configuration file at /etc/yum.conf was:

[main] exclude=apache* bind-chroot courier* dovecot* exim* httpd* mod_ssl* mysql* nsd* perl* php* proftpd* pure-ftpd* ruby* spamassassin* squirrelmail*

Presumably, this is a security measure to prevent people from messing with key applications. If you know what you’re doing and you just want to install the Subversion client, temporarily remove perl* from the exclude list!