02/27/2008 23:19

1802 Setting up AnkhSVN to work with Visual Studio 2005

AnkhSVN is a free Subversion source control plugin for Visual Studio 2005. It took me a little while to get things configured properly, perhaps because I prefer to use PuTTY's plink.exe instead of TortoiseSVN's TortoisePlink.exe. After all, the entire point of using an IDE-integrated Subversion plugin is to avoid having to install Tortoise, right? Here are the steps I took to finally get things jiving: 1. Install AnkhSVN. 2. If you're geeked out enough to be looking for something like AnkhSVN, you probably already have PuTTY, the free Windows ssh client. What you may not have is plink, the headless, scriptable, ssh client from the same author. Download plink and drop it somewhere convenient, like c:\program files\putty\plink.exe. 3. AnkhSVN has written a configuration file in your My Documents\Application Data\subversion\config. Open that file and look for the [tunnels] section. 4. Uncomment the line that begins "#ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh" and change it to read: ssh = c:\\Program\ Files\\putty\\plink.exe -batch -l username -pw password ..where username and password correspond to your credentials on the SVN server. Make sure to use double backslashes as path separators, and single backslashes to escape spaces, when setting the path to plink.exe. And make sure to specify the -batch flag to plink, otherwise your shit just ain't gonna work. 5. If Visual Studio is running, quit it and restart. Go to Tools > AnkhSVN, and you should be able to access the features correctly. Start with the repository browser and enter the URL to your Subversion server: svn+ssh://svn.example.com/usr/local/svnroot/dev for example. As long as the credentials you specified in the config file are valid for svn.example.com, you're good to go. I'm really enjoying AnkhSVN so far. My only complaint is that after completing any commit or checkout operation, the system focus tends to get set to a null state, such that I have to click back into Visual Studio. Maybe there's a way around that I haven't yet discovered, but I consider the minor annoyance a small price to pay to integrate Subversion into VS. I should have a copy of Visual Studio 2008 in May after the Nashville "Heroes Happen Here" kickoff. If I remember, I'll report back as to whether or not AnkhSVN works with 2008.