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:
- Download the TAR to your home directory:
wget http://www.erikfantasia.com/download/godaddy-svn-1.5.6.tar.gz
- Unzip and unpack the archive:
tar zxvf godaddy-svn-1.5.6.tar.gz
- 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.
Erik Fantasia 