Diogo Gomes Blog

Using svn+ssh with RapidSVN

After spending some time searching, I realized that this might help someone else.

Not being able to properly replace MS Visio in neither a Linux or OS X environment, I’ve been stuck with MS Office and a Virtual Machine for this sole purpose in my Linux and OSX environments. I keep my machine very light, I only install MS Office (Word+Excel+Visio), Firefox & Thunderbird, Putty and RapidSVN. This enables me to quickly access and edit a document, either using a web repository (e.g. BSCW), e-mail or SVN (don’t ask why, but some people like to use SVN to share documents in binary format).

My problem started when I needed to access an SVN repository in Windows through an SSH scheme…

My default installation of RapidSVN kept reporting:

Can’t create tunnel: The system cannot find the file specified.

The problem is that RapidSVN does not know how to handle SSH… So here is how to make it handle:

1. Create a session with Putty that connects to the desired server using public key authentication (without requiring you to input any password) more info
2. Download Plink.exe and save it in RapidSVN bin folder
3. Edit subversion configuration. It’s located inside your Windows Profile directory under Application Data\Subversion\config.
4. Look for the [tunnels] section
5. Edit the following entry (notice the / instead of \) according to your setup (I present my default)

ssh = $SVN_SSH C:/Program Files/RapidSVN/bin/plink.exe

6. Now checkout your repository by using the following sintax

svn+ssh://<name of the putty session>/<path to the repository>

That’s it!

Written by Diogo Gomes on August 8, 2007 under English.