I’m walking through the latest beta version of Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Edition, specifically the new bits on deploying Rails apps. Capistrano – the preferred and recommended deployment utility. Thing is – Capistrano hinges on Subversion. Not something covered in AWDwR or appropriate to be covered. There’s plenty of other books on the subject.

Though, that left me stuck on how to set up a Subversion repository and access it.

I do my hosting at TextDrive, and in the interest of making this process just a hair simpler, I set up my svn repository there. Here’s how I did it:

1. Set up repository on TextDrive domain in webmin.[your-server].textdrive.com:80.
   There’s a ‘subversion repository’ menu option right when you sign-in.
2. Assign svn access rights to a TextDrive domain user.
   It’s a radio button and select list selection in their profile.
3. Install Subversion on your local Mac – I did via macports
4. Install svnX and in svnX preferences, confirm your path to svn in svnX (macports uses /opt/local/bin)
5. Import your project into the TextDrive repository
   svn import /Users/your/local/path/to/the/app http://[your-domain]/svn/[repository-name]/ -m 'initial import' --username=[your-svn-account-name]
6. Connect svnX to the repository
   Path: http://[your-domain]/svn/[your-repository-name]
   User: [your-svn-user-name]
   Pass: [your-svn-user-name-pass]
7. Check out your project back on to your mac by clicking the ‘svn checkoutexport‘ button and picking a directory to put it (not your original directory). I created an /svn directory within my main project directory.
8. Now, if everything worked, double-clicking the repository should load it up in a new window.
9. I’ve got a weird proxy between me and the internet right now, so I’ll make sure the commits work tomorrow. UPDATE: Yep, it works. Yah!