Running a centos 6 server with svn repos stored on it. To deploy updates, I'd like to copy from the relevant directory within the svn repo to the appropriate /var/www website directory. Is there a simple way to do this?
Use the svn export command to do that. The subversion red book explains in detail how to do that.
When the relevant svn repo is stored under /export/svn/repo, and the part of the repository you want to copy from is /trunk/my_project/news, the whole command will be:
svn export file:///export/svn/repo/trunk/my_project/news /var/www/news