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I recently moved all my websites over from Dreamhost to Mediatemple because the performance of my sites at dreamhost has been rather poor. (And it is not my fault) On mediatemple they are flying! But as I was transferring over my sites and data, I ran into a problem… subversion on mediatemple. Its not an easy on/off switch like dreamhost. This post will guide you to setting up an SVN repository on your (gs) gridserver at mediatemple, and also how to setup your Mac so you can get SVNx to work with it (its tricky!)

Click the read more link below to view the guide.

Setting up the Repository

First things first, we need to create a repository. Doing this is the simple part! (No, really.) Just follow the guide here:
http://kb.mediatemple.net/article.php?id=143

Mediatemple does a good job of documenting that part, but not so much how to setup SVNx (the only real SVN GUI for Mac OS X) to work with their subversion repositories.

Creating your SSH Key

Before SVNx can work with your svn+ssh:// url, you must create a public/private SSH key for your server. To do this, open up terminal and type up the following:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

You should get output like the following. Leave all the options (passphrase and directory) blank for their default values:

Generating public/private dsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/mh/.ssh/id_dsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/mh/.ssh/id_dsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/mh/.ssh/id_dsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
7c:ad:46:32:9e:b6:6c:4b:29:ab:2a:2b:8c:2f:4e:37

Now, your id_dsa file is your private passkey, and you should never ever ever under any circumstances give this to anyone. Your id_dsa.pub file is your public passkey, and this is what can be distributed.

Putting Your Public Key on Your Mediatemple Server

Now what I did here, because I’m honestly too lazy to type out the few basic commands to create chmod a directory, was use an FTP client to SFTP into my mediatemple server. Doing this is simple, you just FTP like normal, but you use your SSH login information and set the port to 22 (instead of FTP’s default 21), then connect.

Once you’re connected, make sure you’re in the “.home” directory. Here, create a folder “.ssh” and chmod to 700. Go into that directory and upload your id_dsa.pub file.

Now go into SSH and do the following:

cd ~/.ssh
touch authorized_keys2
chmod 600 authorized_keys2
cat ./id_dsa.pub >> authorized_keys2
rm ./id_dsa.pub

This will put the public key into authorized_keys2 and remote the file, and also set the permissions correctly.

Initial Connection

Before SVNx can use your svn+ssh:// url, you must first log in using your key at least once via command line. Luckily, doing this is very simple:

ssh -2 -v serveradmin%yourdomain.com@yourdomain.com

A wall of text should scroll up and at the end you should see that you’re connected to SSH, passwordless! (seemingly)

Setting up SVNx

Setting up the repository in SVNx is like any other. Create a new repository and then enter the URL which should look like the following, except the domain, site number, and repository name should be different.

svn+ssh://serveradmin%yourdomain.com@yourdomain.com/home/12345/data/my_repo

There is no need to enter a username or password because it is included in the SVN url.

Double click to verify that your repository is working, which it should be.