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:
- Create a session with Putty that connects to the desired server using public key authentication (without requiring you to input any password) more info
- Download Plink.exe and save it in RapidSVN bin folder
- Edit subversion configuration. It’s located inside your Windows Profile directory under Application Data\Subversion\config.
- Look for the [tunnels] section
- Edit the following entry (notice the / instead of \) according to your setup (I present my default)
- Now checkout your repository by using the following sintax
ssh = $SVN_SSH C:/Program Files/RapidSVN/bin/plink.exe
svn+ssh://<name of the putty session>/<path to the repository>
That’s it!
Posted: August 8th, 2007 under English.
Tags: Education, tip
Comments
Comment from dgomes
Time 8 August, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Talking about crappy SVN are we
?
Why would I want to add clutter to microsoft crappy explorer ? Been there done that… RapidSVN is clean an sleek
I’m going to check Mercurial by the way…
Comment from dano
Time 23 August, 2007 at 11:33 pm
You don’t have to set up a putty session before hand. Putty has a whole suite of stuff to make things like this work more seemlessly. I have ssh keys set up using Pageant, and all my Putty sessions use it already so I don’t have to type passwords. Plink can be set up the same way.
Setup to use Plink with an agent like this:
ssh = $SVN_SSH c:/program files/putty/plink.exe -l [username] -agent
(that’s the letter el, not capital eye)
Pingback from Setting up a subversion repository in 5 min. | tjansson.dk
Time 15 March, 2008 at 4:35 pm
[...] much to ask of Windows to support SSH out of the box so more tweaking need to make svn+ssh work: Using svn+ssh with RapidSVN Links Version Control with Subversion (Official book) Subversion : automating svn:keywords [...]
Comment from er0k
Time 17 November, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Similar problem with RapidSVN on OS X, except it just fails silently and I had no clue why. Finally figured out that I was missing /usr/libexec/ssh-askpass.
I grabbed a copy from here: http://www.jmknoble.net/software/x11-ssh-askpass/ and compiled it like this:
$ ./configure
$ xmkmf
$ make includes
$ make
$ sudo cp x11-ssh-askpass /usr/libexec/ssh-askpass



Comment from Paulo Pires
Time 8 August, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Why wasting your time with RapidSVN when you have TortoiseSVN?
TortoiseSVN supports every SVN protocol known to man and it’s even explorer.exe friendly.
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
It’s not that I like SVN, I much prefer Mercurial.
Cheers,
PP