Subversion on GoDaddy shared hosting

For better or worse, I’ve been using GoDaddy shared hosting for my personal hosting needs for nearly a year.  It’s cheap and cheerful, with plenty of disk space, bandwidth, SSH access, and easy access to a number of popular open-source apps you can test out with GoDaddy’s hosting connection.  Of course, it does have its drawbacks, and one of the major ones for me has been the nonexistence of a subversion client in the shell environment.

GoDaddy also doesn’t provide a compiler, so building from the source isn’t a possibility.  I read a post suggesting it might be possible to use a binary and decided to give it a shot.

Poking around, I noticed my server was an X86 running CentOS 5.2 (which is essentially RHEL), so downloaded the CollbNet RedHat binary.  The binary was packaged as a RPM file, so I used another machine to unpack it:

rpm2cpio CollabNetSubversion-client-1.5.6-1.i386.rpm | cpio -id

The package I used only included the subversion client.  It also came with some PDFs, man pages, install scripts, and other unnecessary bits which I was able to pare down.  I transferred the leftovers to my GoDaddy home directory, changed some environment variables, and voila – it worked!

If you’re in the same boat, you can download a TAR with everything you need here.

Here’s a step-by-step to get it working from the command line:

1. Download the TAR to your home directory:

   wget http://www.erikfantasia.com/download/godaddy-svn-1.5.6.tar.gz

2. Unzip and unpack the archive:

   tar zxvf godaddy-svn-1.5.6.tar.gz

3. If you haven’t adjusted your default .bashrc file, you can move the included bashrc.svn to overwrite your existing file:

   mv bashrc.svn .bashrc

   Or append the following to your existing .bashrc:

   export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/svn/bin
   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/svn/lib

UPDATE – thanks to Alin for pointing out this will only work for repositories hosted with HTTP/HTTPS.  GoDaddy appears to be blocking the svnserve port 3690.