Question

I just want to browse my Subversion code repositories and view files. Some of the file types, like .VBS, prompt me to open or save the file, but I just want to view it in the browser as plain text. Can Apache’s httpd.conf file be modified to do this? I don’t think it would be changed on the client (IE7) because then it would work the same on all sites.

Answer 1

You can set the mime type of all your vbs files to text/plain by doing this in the root of your working copy:

svn propset --recursive svn:mime-type text/plain *.vbs

and then commit the changes. Explanation from the svn book on repository browsing:

To make this happen, you need only to
make sure that your files have the
proper svn:mime-type set. We discuss
this in more detail in the section
called “File Content Type”, and you
can even configure your client to
automatically attach proper
svn:mime-type properties to files
entering the repository for the first
time; see the section called
“Automatic Property Setting”.

So in our example, if one were to set
the svn:mime-type property to
text/html on file foo.html, Apache
would properly tell your web browser
to render the file as HTML. One could
also attach proper image/* MIME-type
properties to image files and
ultimately get an entire web site to
be viewable directly from a
repository!