pf » Using svn over ssh

January 18, 2006

Using svn over ssh

I was delighted to find that connecting to a subversion repository on a remote server over SSH was quite easy on my Mac (windows may be another story).

All you really need to do is install subversion on the remote server, the subversion install contains something called svnserve that handles all the tunneling magic for you when you connect over SSH.

Now create a repository:

svnadmin create /home/svn/test

Now install the svn client tools on your box. Now you can checkout the repository:

svn co svn+ssh://your.remote-server.com/home/svn/test

That was much easier than I thought it was going to be!

I did run into a few permission issues but its pretty easy to fix those, you just need to make sure the user your connecting with over SSH has permission to read and write to the repository.

As I said connecting with windows may be another story, because windows doesn't come with a ssh command.

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On 01/18/2006 at 10:28:20 AM MST Richard Leggett wrote:

With Windows just install the free Tortoise SVN and that will give you context menus and icon overlays allowing you to perform checkouts, updates, commits and revision graphing etc. Installing Subversion without RPM, now that was the tricky bit :)

On 01/18/2006 at 10:38:59 AM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

Richard, I've used SVN on windows (and Tortoise SVN), but I connected to my repository over webdav, not SSH. Are you saying that Tortoise SVN has a builtin ssh client?

On 01/18/2006 at 10:55:00 AM MST Richard Leggett wrote:

Hi Pete, I think so, I didn't get time to set up WebDav so I'm just using svnserve. Just found this article which relates to the topic:

http://www.logemann.org/day/archives/000099.html

On 01/18/2006 at 11:52:32 AM MST Barney wrote:

HTTPS (via Apache2) is a better way to do secure remote access over SSH. As you've seen, SSH requires careful permission manipulation, but that's not the most troubling problem.

svnserve operates directly on the repository files (using file:/// urls), which means if you ever have two svnserve processes running at the same time, you can get contention, which usually results in a locked repository that has to be taken offline, repaired, and reenabled.

You'll run into the same issue if you combine svnserve and webdav access at the same time.

Bottom line, webdav is the best bet, since it uses a multithreaded server that can handle concurrency without corrupting your database. Apache also supports authentication with client certificates, if you're concerned about security.

On 01/18/2006 at 12:18:47 PM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

Barney, I think you mean SSL not SSH.

I would have preferred connecting over Apache2 and webdav with HTTPS, but in this case I already have Apache 1.3 running, and can't use Apache 2 due to some other requirements, thus the SSH tunnel.

Luckily I don't think I will need to worry much about contention in this case since I will mainly be the only one using it for now.

On 01/18/2006 at 12:47:32 PM MST Barney wrote:

I did mean SSH, but did a horrible job wording it. "HTTPS is a better alternative than SSH" is what I should have said. I failed in my conveyance of "prefer HTTPS over SSH".

You can still run Apache2 on a non-standard port. So Apache 1.3 on :80 for your web work, and then Apache2 on :81 (or whatever) for your SVN repositories. Not that it matters a whole lot if none of the SSH downsides are relevant, but for others who might come across this post looking for insight.

On 01/18/2006 at 1:48:42 PM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

Thanks for your insight barney.

In my case its not worth the overhead of running another server, but it might be for some.

On 01/20/2006 at 3:28:24 PM MST Brian wrote:

There's a slight mistake in the syntax for the ssh connection string. You need to add in your username like so:

svn co svn+ssh://username@your.remote-server.com/home/svn/test

Same syntax as SSH uses. It's actually probably not a mistake because from the command line it will prompt you for the username, but if you want to use it with a tool like TortoiseSVN, you need to pass it all in at once.

Brian

On 01/20/2006 at 3:43:07 PM MST Pete Freitag wrote:

Hi Brian,

From the shell it will use your local username by default, in my case it was the same as the remote username so I omitted it. But thanks for pointing that out.

On 02/27/2006 at 6:31:40 PM MST Tom wrote:

Install cygwin, you'll then have ssh and more on windows.

On 06/23/2006 at 2:44:48 PM MDT Vivek wrote:

I have an svn repository running on a hosted server. I would like to administrator that repository using svnadmin tool. I have the information how to ssh to the server. What i am not understanding is after establishing the ssh connection how would i use svnadmin tool. For example I want to export the whole repository to my local hard so that I can import it into a local svn server. Any Help is appreciated. Vivek

On 10/05/2006 at 10:53:31 AM MDT Darrin Gorski wrote:

This is a great thread and has been extremely helpful to me getting TortoiseSVN working. However, in the interest of others viewing this thread, I feel the need to address some misinformation in Barney's initial post.

There is absolutely no technical reason that you should be concerned about multiple processes accessing the directory. There is no reason the you should not use svnserve, nor is there any reason not to use ssh access. svn was designed for concurrency, and many people use the cli tools on mulituser servers locally operating on the repository.

I was just concerned that people might take away from this discussion that svn+ssh is somehow bad and that apache is the only way to go. In my opionion, the apache+dav solution is for apache folks, and the svn+ssh solution is for ssh folks and it has more to do with your environment and expertise/preference than with any specific technical deficiencies in either approach.

- Darrin

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.0/ch06s05.html

On 11/30/2006 at 1:45:17 PM MST Tom wrote:

I've heard it mentioned that when you use the Berkeley DB as the backend for SVN, there is a chance of locking problems. However, the FSFS backend (the current default) is more robust.

On 03/19/2007 at 4:19:52 PM MST hungrytom wrote:

If you are using windows, just download yourself a copy of putty.exe for free and use that to ssh into your server..

google putty download

If you want to get really carried away, the best tool out there for easy SVN is TortoiseSVN.

google TortoiseSVN download

Its pretty simple to use and saves a great deal of time which would be spent messing around with SSH clients and typing commands over and over... ;)

On 09/17/2008 at 12:44:54 AM MDT georgexsh wrote:

Hi, Pete, svn+ssh:// works fine while opensshd listen on the default port 22, but how to make svn+ssh works while changed opensshd listen on port other than 22? svn+ssh://host:port/path dont work

On 10/05/2008 at 11:16:21 AM MDT Gigs wrote:

This was SO MUCH FASTER than DAV. We are talking 5 minutes vs 60 minutes for large operations. Thanks!

On 12/21/2008 at 12:09:36 AM MST christefano wrote:

georgexsh, add this line to the "tunnels" section of your config file in ~/.subversion/config

ssh2222 = /usr/bin/ssh -p 2222 -l georgexsh

Instead of using "svn+ssh" you can now use "svn+ssh2222" instead (just change "2222" and "georgexsh" to your SSH port and username, respectively).

On 03/03/2009 at 11:31:51 PM MST faisal wrote:

How can i restrict the access permissions of the svn clients in the following way 1. Can create new folders in the repository 2. Update the files created by themselves 3. Can not delete a delete even if they themselves created it