If you control access to your SVN repository via Apache authentication, then you’ll undoubtedly have a password file somewhere on your system, containing the list of all the users who have an account that can access your SVN repo.

The standard file used by Subversion for this task is located at /etc/subversion/passwd.

Now that we know that, changing a user account’s password used to access the SVN is relatively trivial, and achieved through the use of the Linux htpasswd function.

First, let’s grab a list of all user accounts currently with access to your SVN repository:

cat /etc/subversion/passwd

Now let’s change a user’s password by making use of the -m switch to specify a password change using MD5 encryption, where usertomodify is the username of the user you wish to affect.

sudo htpasswd -m /etc/subversion/passwd usertomodify

Done. Note that the call without a switch would attempt to add a new user account, with a -D switch would remove the specified user and with a -c switch would create a new user but overwrite your existing password file!

Nifty.