('Error:', 'cannot find SVN include svn_client.h - use --svn-inc-dir')

I was working on one of the subversion servers to trying to get email alerts every time a commit was made. I managed to get it going but that will be a new article. This article details a error I received on a Ubuntu server while trying to install pysvn .

The exact error is I got was when running the configure script for pysvn:

root@redmine:/usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Source# python setup.py configure
Info: Found PyCXX include in /usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Import/pycxx-6.1.1
Info: Found PyCXX Source in /usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Import/pycxx-6.1.1/Src
Info: Found Python include in /usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Import/pycxx-6.1.1 /usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Import/pycxx-6.1.1/Src /usr/include/python2.6
('Error:', 'cannot find SVN include svn_client.h - use --svn-inc-dir')

From the error messages it appears that the pysvn cant find some of the required subversion files. This was odd because I know I have subversion installed.

After a little work I determined that I needed some of the development packages for svn in order to get this to work.

In Ubuntu the packages were named libsvn1 & libsvn-dev:

apt-get install libsvn1 libsvn-dev

Once I got these installed I ran the setup.py again and this time it built just fine:

root@redmine:/usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Source# python setup.py configure
Info: Found PyCXX include in /usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Import/pycxx-6.1.1
Info: Found PyCXX Source in /usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Import/pycxx-6.1.1/Src
Info: Found Python include in /usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Import/pycxx-6.1.1 /usr/local/pysvn-1.7.2/Import/pycxx-6.1.1/Src /usr/include/python2.6
Info: Found SVN include in /usr/include/subversion-1
Info: Found APR include in /usr/include/apr-1.0
Info: Found SVN bin in /usr/bin
Info: Found SVN library in /usr/lib
Info: Found APR library in /usr/lib
Info: Creating Makefile for Source
Info: Building against SVN 1.5.4
Info: Creating Makefile for Tests