Even more surprising, I was able to get Subversion over SSH working with my HostGator shared web hosting account. I had been searching for a private Subversion repository that I could use for my own projects. Something very simple for one developer doing infrequent source control file check-ins. I didn’t want to use the free and/or public Subversion hosting companies because I didn’t want to expose my code; I wanted to strictly control code ownership. So, using Subversion with my shared web hosting account was the perfect answer to my needs.
Disclaimer: Please don’t abuse this info by setting up a Subversion repository on your shared HostGator web hosting account for a bunch of active developers. Because it is shared hosting, such an action would probably cause issues for other customers and Hostgator may decide to prevent this usage. Use this as a private, one developer Subversion repository (equivalent to having a local repository and rsync’ing it to/from your web host, though a lot more convenient).
Before you start, you must have SSH public key authentication working. On Mac OS X, you also must create the “%HOME%/.ssh/config” file to use port 2222 by default. See my previous post, SSH and SSL With HostGator Shared Web Hosting, for instructions.
Create Subversion Repository
Create a Subversion repository on the server by issuing the following commands:
cd mydirectory
mkdir myrepos
svnadmin create myrepos
Test Subversion Client Connection
On Mac OS X, test your connection to the Subversion repository by running the following:
If successfully, this should output an empty line (because you don’t have anything in the repository yet) instead of a connection error message.
On Windows, we need to configure Subversion to use a SSH tunnel with port 2222 by default. Modify the “%APPDATA%\Subversion\config” file by adding a custom line below the “[tunnels]” section:
ssh = ssh -p 2222
We can then test the Subversion client’s connectivity on Windows by running the same command as on Mac OS X:
The change to “%APPDATA%\Subversion\config” will cause all svn+ssh calls to use port 2222. This will break connectivity to servers which do not use 2222 for the SSH port. One can accommodate this scenario by creating a custom tunnel name like so:
ssh2222 = ssh -p 2222
Then, to use it, the Subversion client command to run would look like this:
To avoid duplication, we will use “svn+ssh” for both Mac OS X and Windows in the instructions below. Please adjust accordingly if you decide to use a custom tunnel name.
Add Project To Repository
Add or import a project into the Subversion repository using the following command on the Mac OS X or Windows client:
Run the previous “svn list” test command to see the imported project listed in the subversion repository.
Checkout the Project
On the client, checkout or export the project to another local directory:
Once the checkout is complete, you can issue subversion commands in the local, checked out project directory without having to specify the “svn+ssh” URL like so:
svn update
...
svn diff
svn ci -m "first commit"
The subversion commands will use the “svn+ssh” URL stored locally in the checked out project’s “.svn” configuration directory.
The purpose of the subversion commands above and others are explained in a previous blog, Add Subversion to the XAMPP Apache Server.
Secure File Permissions
The Subversion server may write files which include read access for the group and others. To close this security hole, I suggest manually restricting the file permissions in the Subversion repository after importing a project or adding assets.
These commands will set read-write access for only the user on all folders and files under the Subversion repository:
find ~/mydirectory/myrepos -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 700
Information concerning the custom SSH tunnel gotten from How to configure SVN/SSH with SSH on non standard port?.
Awesome! Thanks! I saw hostgator’s posting indicating you can’t use hostgator for repositories, and was happy one can work around this to some extent.