Friday, October 24, 2008

Subclipse error: Svn can't create tunnel. Configuring SVN+SSH connection on Windows Vista

Good morning!

Yesterday I wanted to install the beautiful Eclipse IDE on my new Windows Vista laptop. Everything went fine. I also installed Subclipse, the interface to the "Subversion" Version Control System, in order to access my code in the repositories on the remote machines of my Insitute.
Everything went fine again, but then, when I wanted to set up a SVN+SSH connection to checkout my code from the remote machine, I got this error:

The system cannot find the file specified.
svn: Can't create tunnel: The system cannot find the file specified.

Looking on Internet I found a solution for Windows XP, that I had to modify a little bit. Here the solution.

The problem is that you have to specify the path of your SSH client. You can use the classical PuTTY or Plink, but I prefer to use the TortoisePlink, the modified version of Plink contained in the excellent TortoiseSVN package. Using the TortoisePlink client you will be prompted for your username and password without opening an ugly CMD window (the command line window) every time.

So, let's say you have already installed the SVN client, you have now to modify the config file.
In Windows Vista this file is stored in the hidden folder

C:\Users\[username]\App Data\Roaming\Subversion

There you find the file named config. Open it with an editor (for instance Notepad) and look for the string

[tunnels]

this line must be uncommented (no hash # symbol at the beginning of the line). Then you have to modify the line below, to set the right path to your SSH client

# ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh

Let's say you installed the package TortoiseSVN at C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN
so you can leave commented the line # ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh and you can add this line just below it:

ssh = C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoisePlink.exe

Done!! :-)

Now you should be able to connect to your remote site with SVN through a secure SSH tunnelling connection.

And, as always, let me know if you have some problems! ;-)

3 commenti:

Unknown said...

it works in Xp also..

the path to config file is: “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Subversion\”

cheers!

Pelerin-Voyageur said...

Hi Tarun!
Nice! Thanks for the check and for having let me know :-)

Have a nice day!

Anonymous said...

still not working !!!!!