Hosting Subversion on Webfaction

Recent projects at work have finally led me to incorporate Subversion into my Django development workflow. Once I saw the light, I wanted to manage my personal and client projects with the same efficiency, but hesitated to sign up for SVN hosting services on my own dime. Turns out I could add SVN hosting to my existing WebFaction account.

WebFaction provides a screencast for adding SVN and Trac, but I don’t need the Trac features, and prefer my tutorials in text and images. The following steps walk through the easy process of hosting SVN on WebFaction.

Create new application of type ‘Subversion’

SVN on Webfaction: Add SVN app

Set up an svn subdomain for yourdomain.com

SVN on Webfaction: Set up svn subdomain

Create website attaching svn app to svn.yourdomain.com at path using https

SVN on Webfaction: Mount SVN app at SVN subdomain

Login via ssh to your WebFaction account, then change directories to the svn app you created.

Use the ‘htpasswd’ command to create your user and password, with syntax: htpasswd .htpasswd username

Enter your password and verify

SVN on Webfaction: Create SVN user

Delete the test user from .htpasswd in the text editor of your choice.

You can now access your SVN repository at https://svn.yourdomain.com and manage as many projects in there as you’d like.


Discussion
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XP-Dev.com provides free svn hosting and does not require open access to repositories (like Assembla does currently). I do not want to host my svn along with web projects, as I tend to swith hosting providers often, so this seems reasonable to me. Of course, YMMV. :)

December 4th 2008, 4 a.m. by zgoda
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zgoda, I've been so happy with WebFacion (especially in comparison to Dreamhost) that until my needs change drastically, or they do something really unexpected, I'm not going anywhere. By hosting my SVN repositories on WebFaction, I get to keep my development needs under one account, and face no restrictions on users or repositories.

December 4th 2008, 3:24 p.m. by Ryan Berg
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I have a Dreamhost account but I read a lot of good things about Webfactions, and in particular its close ressemblance to a VPS hosting, with root access and tutti quanti. My question is more about versioning. Is it possible to deploy Mercurial or Git on Webfaction ? Subversion is nice but missing some important features.

December 4th 2008, 7:05 p.m. by Richard Lopes
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Richard, I have no experience with Mercurial or Git. Shoot an email over to WebFaction and I'm sure they'd answer your question pretty promptly.

December 4th 2008, 7:24 p.m. by Ryan Berg
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@Richard I have tried setting up a git repo on webfaction but that seems to be a problem. I actually created a custom app listening on a port and installed gitosis, but kept on giving errors. Webfaction support could n't help with me with it.
If you have a VPS follow this tutorial to host your git repo.

December 5th 2008, 12:03 a.m. by yashh
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I've been with WebFaction for over 2 years and I absolutely love them. I run a Django, Svn and Trac app and I've never had any pb.

December 5th 2008, 7:11 a.m. by Dave
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Funny I just setting up SVN on Webfaction a few days ago and was looking for quick tutorial. Thanks.

December 5th 2008, 12:11 p.m. by Brian M.
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Mercurial also works well. I've hosted several hg repos on my Webfaction account (including some for Django stuff, BTW). Initially, I did a quick search in their user forums and found the info I needed right away.

I have used Webfaction for years and really like them. The support has always been excellent. And they have lots of good info online, too.

December 5th 2008, 2:51 p.m. by Jonas Beckman
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Great article. Just what I was looking for.

December 6th 2008, 4:10 p.m. by andriyko

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