Many people use subversion over ssh for a simple and secure way to work on remotely hosted svn repositories. This is normally as simple as running: svn co svn+ssh://user@server/repo .

If the remote ssh server is not running on the default ssh port (tcp 22) then this needs a little tweaking to get it working. Normally I was expecting that adding a custom entry for the svn server in the /etc/ssh/ssh_config file with the appropriate port would make this work on the fly without changing the command line; or if not, adding the ssh port in ‘telnet like’ way: server:port would make a difference. Still none of those worked and in order to get this working I had to dig into the subversion documentation on how we can define a special tunnel.

We can define a new tunnel in the svn configuration file (.subversion/config): [tunnels] sshtunnel = ssh -p <port>

And after this we can use svn as usual but with a url like svn+sshtunnel:// : svn co svn+sshtunnel://user@server/repo .