Many servers are configured to require authentication on every request. This can become a big annoyance to users, who are forced to type their passwords over and over again.

Happily, the Subversion client has a remedy for this: a built-in system for caching authentication credentials on disk. By default, whenever the command-line client successfully authenticates itself to a server, it saves the credentials in the user's private runtime configuration area—in ~/.subversion/auth/ on Unix-like systems or %APPDATA%/Subversion/auth/ on Windows. (The runtime area is covered in more detail in the section called “Runtime Configuration Area”.) Successful credentials are cached on disk, keyed on a combination of hostname, port, and authentication realm.

When the client receives an authentication challenge, it first looks for the appropriate credentials in the disk cache; if not present, or if the cached credentials fail to authenticate, then the client simply prompts the user for the information.

Security-conscious people may be thinking to themselves, “Caching passwords on disk? That's terrible! You should never do that!” Please remain calm, it's not as dangerous as it sounds.

To disable caching for a single command, pass the --no-auth-cache option:

$ svn commit -F log_msg.txt --no-auth-cache
Authentication realm: <svn://host.example.com:3690> example realm
Username:  joe
Password for 'joe':

Adding         newfile
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 2324.

# password was not cached, so a second commit still prompts us

$ svn delete newfile
$ svn commit -F new_msg.txt
Authentication realm: <svn://host.example.com:3690> example realm
Username:  joe
…

Or, if you want to disable credential caching permanently, you can edit your runtime config file (located next to the auth/ directory). Simply set store-auth-creds to no, and no credentials will be cached on disk, ever.

[auth]
store-auth-creds = no

Sometimes users will want to remove specific credentials from the disk cache. To do this, you need to navigate into the auth/ area and manually delete the appropriate cache file. Credentials are cached in individual files; if you look inside each file, you will see keys and values. The svn:realmstring key describes the particular server realm that the file is associated with:

$ ls ~/.subversion/auth/svn.simple/
5671adf2865e267db74f09ba6f872c28        
3893ed123b39500bca8a0b382839198e
5c3c22968347b390f349ff340196ed39

$ cat ~/.subversion/auth/svn.simple/5671adf2865e267db74f09ba6f872c28

K 8
username
V 3
joe
K 8
password
V 4
blah
K 15
svn:realmstring
V 45
<https://svn.domain.com:443> Joe's repository
END

Once you have located the proper cache file, just delete it.

One last word about client authentication behavior: a bit of explanation about the --username and --password options is needed. Many client subcommands accept these options; however it is important to understand using these options does not automatically send credentials to the server. As discussed earlier, the server “pulls” credentials from the client when it deems necessary; the client cannot “push” them at will. If a username and/or password are passed as options, they will only be presented to the server if the server requests them. ^[23] Typically, these options are used when:

Here is a final summary that describes how a Subversion client behaves when it receives an authentication challenge:

If the client successfully authenticates by any of the methods listed above, it will attempt to cache the credentials on disk (unless the user has disabled this behavior, as mentioned earlier).