Tim's Blog

I dont like tortoisesvn I just want to keep my dev system bloat free. Today I got svn over ssh working with command line svn client and plink (which comes with putty). Without it you get errors like this:

SVN+SSH Error * Can’t create tunnel : The system cannot find the file specified.

Heres the short version:

1. Install putty full windows installer, I used c:\program files as the install destination.
2. Install svn command line only client
3. Copy your ssh id_dsa private key onto your windows box and use putty gen to convert it to a putty ppk file and then save it in your home dir under /putty
4. Create a shortcut in your startup folder to pageant.exe with the option afterwards pointing to your ppk file e.g. “C:\Program Files\PuTTY\pageant.exe”  “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\putty\id_dsa.ppk”
5. Use thexp environment variables editor thingy to create the SVN_SSH env var. Its important to double upon the spaces as shown: key: SVN_SSH value: “C:\Program Files\PuTTY\plink.exe”
6. Use putty to connect once to the svn ssh server so putty can add the server ssh public key to its cache.
7. Use svn from the command line normally (you may need to start pageant manually the first time since it will only get started when you login normally).

Hope that saves someone a bit of hunting around because I didnt really find the process well documented anywhere.