Picklewagon

A few months ago I started using Media Temple as a web host. I first heard about it on the TalkCrunch podcast with Michael Arrington (Media Temple Launches Grid Server). After looking at other hosting companies I decided to give it a shot. One of the deciding factors was the fact that I could setup a subversion repository for my projects.

I have had the account for a few months and haven’t taken advantage up to this point. I tried a few times before but quickly found out each time that it would take more than a few minutes to setup. I decided to take the time to finally do it. It wasn’t difficult-it just took a little time.

Please note that I did this on a Windows XP computer.

I had two requirements for the project:

1. Setup the subversion repository.
2. Use eclipse to perform the updates, etc.

I first started out by reading a doc (How to Setup a Subversion Repository) in Media Temple’s knowledge base. It explains how to set up your repository on the command line. The doc does a good job of explaining everything if you are going to use the command line to commit your code. In my case the doc is overkill since I will be using eclipse to do everything.

The only thing that was necessary was to create the directory where your repository will exist. I decided to name my repository ’subversion’. You can be more original if you would like.

Next I moved to getting eclipse to work with the repository. You’ll need Subclipse, an eclipse plugin that adds Subversion integration to the eclipse IDE.

Since you must have SSH access enable to access your repository, you will add an appropriate connection string when creating a new subversion repository inside eclipse. I used this template for my connection string:

svn+ssh://serveradmin%25<customerdomain.com>@<customerdomain.com>/home/<site_number>/data/<repo-name>

Be sure to substitute your actual domain for ‘<customerdomain.com>’ (twice), your actual site number for ‘<site_number>’ and your repository name for ‘<repo-name>’.

If you need help on how to create a Subversion repository inside eclipse, refer to the help docs.

After doing this and trying to connect to the repository, I was getting the following error inside eclipse:

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

This basically means that you need an SSH executable. I tried to get it to work with putty but I was unsuccessful. I did, however get it to work with TortoiseSVN. I found a good write-up explaining how to get everything configured correctly.

After all of that, I was able to successfully upload a few of my projects to the repository. As a porgrammer, I have been needing and wanting to do this for a while.