I have been looking for somewhere to host a private Subversionaccount, when I discovered that the guys who host this domain are already providing me with this functionality. This is just a quick post to outline how easy it was to set up and identify a couple of wrinkles that I came across when getting Eclipse (+ Subclipse) set up on Site5.com.

I had already got SSH access set up on my host to play around Ruby on Rails. Further down the track I discovered that the standard site5.com shell caused some issues with Subclipse. When I tried to create the new repository location in Eclipse I kept getting: “Malformed network data”. I think the problem was the welcome message that the standard shell shows when you login. This was trivially solved by asking site5.com support to change to the shell to Bash.

Once you have Bash access you can simply log on. Subversion is already installed so it was simply a case of creating the new repository and away you go. From your home directory (where username is your site5 username):

svnadmin create /home/username/subversion

Subversion does its magic and creates the repository. I already have Subclipse installed so it is now a question of firing up the IDE and creating the new repository location in Eclipse. Open up the Subversion Repository view (Window -> Show View -> SVN Repository). Right click on the SVN Repository view (Right click -> new -> Repository Location) and add the URL:

svn+ssh://domain.com/home/username/subversion

Note that the subversion path is the full path name for the account.

Subclipse will now ask for the authorisation credentials. The username is your account username. The password is your account password. Tick the save information box and press finish.

One personal subversion account in under 30 seconds. That wasn’t hard was it?

Site5.com

I have found Site5.com to be excellent. Their packages are great value. Their set up time is brilliant and their support service is BLISTERINGLY fast. It is not unsual for the whole problem or query to be solved in 5 mins from the time I send the first mail – no matter what time of day or night. First class!