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)

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

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.

Paulo Pires

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

Diogo Gomes

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... ;)

dano

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)

er0k

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

Micha

Thanks for the tutorial - clunky (that's Windows, not the tutorial!) but it works.

Anybody know if there's a way to stop plink from popping up Windows CMD windows?