How can I set proxy for subversion with ssh tunnel?

I want to check out/update the code via proxy since my local connection is slow. I setup ssh tunnel : ssh -D 8090 [email protected] to forward all the packets to my localhost:8090.

How can I set up subversion to use this?

Solution 1:

You are using SSH to set up a local SOCKS server that tunnels to your SSH server. You mention that your reason for doing that is that "local connection is slow" but I fail to see how tunneling to a SSH server will make it faster.

Anyway, your problem is that Subversion can connect through a HTTP proxy or an SSH tunnel, but it has no idea about SOCKS. So you need to SOCKSify Subversion by capturing all its TCP connects and redirecting them to the SOCKS proxy.

Instead of paraphrasing those who have done it before, I'll point you to their detailed explanations :

• http://blog.yimingliu.com/2009/03/05/ssh-subversion-through-socks-proxy-on-mac-os-x/
• http://sites.google.com/a/gapps.oxuni.org.uk/oliver/Home/Teleworking

Or in a nutshell mostly cut'n'pasted from Oliver's page :

Debian contains two socksifiers that are also available on sourceforge. The most recently updated one is ProxyChains, and it's quite straightforward to configure. Most socksifiers work in a similar fashion so these instructions should be a reasonable general case. To configure ProxyChains you just need to edit $(HOME)/.proxychains/proxychains.conf to have only the following lines:

DynamicChain
tcp_read_time_out 15000
tcp_connect_time_out 10000
[ProxyList]
socks5 127.0.0.1 8090
# NB: for some reason 'localhost' doesn't work in the above line

All you then need to do is 'wrap' svn in ProxyChains.

proxychains svn commit

In the above example, the svn application was none the wiser that its TCP connects to the Subversion server were redirected down your SOCKS proxy."

Solution 2:

Posting here, as I found a less kludge-y way to do this. You can use Polipo to use your SSH SOCKS tunnel over HTTP proxy, by adding following lines to its configuration:

socksParentProxy = "localhost:8090"
socksProxyType = socks5

polipo by default listen on port 8123. And then in $HOME/.subversion/servers create a group for subversion hosts you want to check out from, e.g. if your subversion repository host(s) are named proj1.svn.domain.tld, proj2.svn.domain.tld, etc., then add following to [groups] section:

[groups]
domain = *.svn.domain.tld

And finally specify a proxy configuration for the group of the hosts you just added by adding a block for the group:

[domain]
http-proxy-host=localhost
http-proxy-port=8123

After this you should be able to operate on repository normally, as you used to work without SSH tunnel.

HTH