To set up a cvsnt 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 the section called “Server requirements”.

To estimate disk space requirements, if you are importing rcs files from another system, the size of those files is the approximate initial size of your repository, or if you are starting without any version history, a rule of thumb is to allow for the server approximately three times the size of the code to be under cvsnt for the repository (you will eventually outgrow this, but not for a while). On the machines on which the developers will be working, you'll want disk space for approximately one working directory for each developer (either the entire tree or a portion of it, depending on what each developer uses).

The repository should be accessible (directly or via a networked file system) from all machines which want to use cvsnt in server or local mode; the client machines need not have any access to it other than via the cvsnt protocol. It is not possible to use cvsnt to read from a repository which one only has read access to; cvsnt needs to be able to create lock files (the section called “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 cvsnt root specified in the usual way (Chapter 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.