SVN on BlueHost
I’m in the process of migrating most of my sites from DreamHost to BlueHost. Putting the reasons for the move aside (<cough>uptime</cough>), DreamHost has one major advantage over BlueHost: easy-to-setup SVN. On BlueHost, SVN isn’t installed, so it took a bit of research to figure out how to do it. I found installation instructions in a few places, but (1) they were all for version 1.4.6 (1.6.4 is the current version) and (2) they didn’t quite work for me. So, here’s how I went about it:
cd ~/src wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.6.4.tar.gz wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.6.4.tar.gz tar xzf subversion-1.6.4.tar.gz tar xzf subversion-deps-1.6.4.tar.gz cd subversion-1.6.4 ./configure --prefix=$HOME make make install cd ~ mkdir svn cd svn svnadmin create MyRepository
Pretty simple, overall. Subversion handles all of the dependencies automagically. The only non-standard bit there is the --prefix=$HOME to install it in my home directory (where I have write permission).
Now I can check out my repository with:
svn co svn+ssh://myUserName@mydomain.com/home/myUserName/svn/MyRepository
Notice the use of the svn+ssh protocol. BlueHost doesn’t have mod_svn enabled for Apache, so you can’t connect using HTTP.
Thanks to the Subversion / TortoiseSVN SSH HowTo and these instructions for remembering SSH passwords, I was able to save a session in PuTTY and use those settings to connect using a public key, so I don’t have to enter a password 400 times to check out the repository.