How To Work With Google Code On Ubuntu, Mepis, or Debian

I just started work on a new project with a friend. We set up the project on GoogleCode.com. Its quick and easy to set up a project at Google Code and they have Subversion support!

But connecting via Subversion to Google Code on Debian/Ubuntu/Mepis is not as easy as I'd like it to be. Believe me I tried it on Debian, Ubuntu and Mepis. Here's how I got connected to Google Code and checked out my repo!

Step One

If you were like me and installed Subversion via apt-get out of the standard Debian repos you won't be able to connect because that version of the svn client doesn't support https:// authentication. Apparently it was not configured with it. So I downloaded t this package. This is a static build of the svn tools on i386. So all you have to do is untar it. In side the tar is a bin folder. I put the contents of that in /usr/local/bin.

Now you should be able to connect to your Subversion repo like thus:

/usr/local/bin/svn checkout https://projectname.googlecode.com/svn/ projectname

The google code page incorrectly give you a checkout path of /svn/trunk. Trunk doesn't exist and you'll get a not found error if you try to check it out.

After issuing the checkout command you'll get a prompt to accept a certificate. Then you'll get a prompt for a user name and password.

Step Two: Your Google Code Password

Google code provides a nicely integrated experience. You can login into Google code with your GMail username and password. But when you are checking out code, you have to provide a "Google Code generated password". If you don't you won't be able to authenticate and you'll get an error like this:

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/svn'
svn: PROPFIND of '/svn': authorization failed (https://zfbase.googlecode.com)

I hope this helps others of you struggling to make this work under a Debian based distro.

Cheers!