Reyco1’s Flash Blog

Reynaldo August 17th, 2008

Hello fellow developers and architects!

Let me start off by saying that if you are going to use svn on your MT grid server the last place you want to go for installation instructions is the MediaTemple Knowledge Base. I can grantee you that will be cause of major hair loss on your part. Not only are the instructions vague and confusing, they’re just darn annoying.

I have absolutely no experience dealing with Linux servers or anything Linux for that matter but I was able to set up my svn repo with the help of a good friend. I figured I’d lay it out here for the world to see and not have to go through what I went through for the good part of my weekend. Enough venting, on to the good stuff!

First of all, the kb article over at MT is not completely messed up. You can actually go through steps 1-3 and still be in calm waters, but before you do that, there are a few things that I want to go over with you. First off, you need your server id; this usually starts with a letter followed by 5 numbers. You can find it in your “Service Activation Letter” email sent to you by MT when you first set hp your account under the FTP Login Information. You’re going to need the username and password too to log in to your server.

Also, in step 3 where it indicates <repo_name>, you have to replace that with the name of the repository on your server. This is not the name of your actual project. Let’s assume that you’ll name it myRepo.

Here’s the kb article, follow steps 1-3 and then come back.

Waiting…

…

Welcome back! At this point you should have successfully set up your svn repository on your MT grid server but we still need to add a folder for your project. Step 4 on the MT article tells you how to do that, but I found it a little confusing. So here’s a clearer explanation:

OK, so to create a folder (and sub folders) for your project we use the “mkdir” command. Let’s assume that our project name is myProject type in:

mkdir myProject
mkdir myProject/trunk
mkdir myProject/branches
mkdir myProject/tags

Now its time to import the newly created folders into the repository, remember that above we assumed that the name of our svn repository was myRepo. You’re also going to need that server id we mentioned above and replace the hashes with it. Type in:

svn import myProject file:///home/#####/data/myRepo –message “Creating initial repo.”

After pressing executing that last line you should be all set!

To access your newly created svn repo, just create a folder on your desktop (i.e.), right-click and choose “SVN Checkout”.

This is what you should put in your “URL of Repository” field; remember to change the hashes to your verver id and replace “yourdomain” with your actual domain name:

svn+ssh://serveradmin@yourdomain.com@yourdomain.com/home/#####/data/myRepo

That’s all folks! TortoiseSVN will 99.9% of the time ask you for your password. This is gonna be the same password you used on putty.

Hope this was useful!

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