Subvert the dominant, oh geez, I can't even type it

November 23, 2009 5:25 PM

Any experience / suggestions / pearls of wisdom / recommendations for free Subversion hosting? TIA, no more inside.
posted by mwhybark to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Is the requirement to have an offsite repository accessible by multiple people over the internet, or do you just need a repository to version your code? You can always set up a repository on your local machine and access it with the file:// protocol.

Google Code offers free SVN hosting, but I think the catch is that your project has to be open source.
posted by usonian at 5:57 PM on November 23, 2009 [1 favorite]

I assume you ask because you have no machine hooked up to the internet directly (with a static IP).

This article runs down some available hosts. How close to free do you really need? Many hosting options are less than USD$10 a month. usonian is right, Google Code is only for open source projects, but you might try OpenSVN or XP-Dev.com.
posted by axiom at 6:36 PM on November 23, 2009

With subversion you trust your host with the only coherent history of your code base. You should find one that allows you to make backups of the data that are kept under your control.
posted by fritley at 6:42 PM on November 23, 2009

the wikipedia page for subversion references xp-dev.com as a free provider, but it looks like the free accounts are ad-supported.

if you're not married to subversion (and instead are looking for a hosted repository of some variety), there's always GitHub for git, or if Mercurial is more your thing, they list a few hosting providers in their wiki.
posted by namewithoutwords at 7:01 PM on November 23, 2009

Sourceforge SVN hosting has proved straightforward for my opensource project.
posted by primer_dimer at 4:34 AM on November 24, 2009

Sourceforge and GoogleCode are the first two that come to mind. You are trusting both parties not to fuck up, but they presumably have lots of experience managing large code bases.

I would use Git, personally. GitHub is awesome.
posted by chunking express at 7:48 AM on November 24, 2009

Response by poster: I think unsonian's suggestion of doing it locally is ideal for now. My primary objective is to implement versioning practices in my workflow and at the moment I don't need to sweat multiple users. I have a reasonably full-featured hosting account but they are stroppy about shell access, which hasn't really been that big a hassle. The procedural reason for looking at in-the-cloud is it forces an offsite backup, which is useful paranoia.
posted by mwhybark at 11:03 PM on November 25, 2009