Subversion (SVN) Triumph!

I use Bluehost for this web site (and others). My brother and I actually share the account. The service has been very good, overall—it's certainly better than 1&1! However, I recently found one little fault; they do not provide subversion (SVN) support. I don't necessarily need a subversion repository (though that would be nice). Rather, I need to be able to sync with other respositories, particularly for Drupal development.

So a few days ago, I began trying to get SVN to work on Bluehost. I have finally succeeded, despite limited experience with compiling programs on Linux! I might even be able to host an SVN repository, via svn+ssh (I haven't tried that yet).

I followed some clear, step-by-step instructions to compile and setup SVN on Bluehost.com. I heartily thank DaveMac for those instructions!

All that is missing is SSL support, so my transfers aren't as secure as I would like. But I might just use a local repository anyway.

I also found and signed up for a free account at XP-dev.com, which provides SVN hosting and projected management tools. I will be using it for a work project too, until a more permanent (and local) solution is ready. I picked XP-Dev from a list of free SVN hosts.

There is also a FLOSS book for SVN. It is the official SVN manual.

Both this and my work sites are importing right now. On a side note, an import cannot exclude subfolders, so I had to copy my work site to a temporary location, clear out what I didn't want, and import that. Later, I'll need to add exclude rules for those folders.

The long-term goal of this setup is to have development environments (on my laptop) which can be modified, tested, broken, etc. When a site change is stable and whole, I can commit that, then go to the server and update the live site directly. If there is a problem, I just revert the site files (also using SVN) to the previous, working version.

My next big task is to upgrade this site to Drupal 6!