darcs over FTP

I'm currently unable to access SSH, and suspect this situation will persist for most of the Summer. Most of my darcs repo's are behind SSH, so this presents a problem. I've been looking for a way to work with darcs over FTP, and have managed to get it going on Windows. The following are instructions for (1) me when I forget them and (2) any Windows users who want to follow the same path. If you are a Linux user, then similar information is available from this blog post.

Step 1: Install Sitecopy

Go to http://dennisbareis.com/freew32.htm and download and install SITECPY.

Add "C:\Program Files\SITECOPY" to your path.

Add "C:\Home" to a %HOME% variable.

Open up a command line and type:

c:\> mkdir home
c:\> cd home
c:\home> mkdir .sitecopy
c:\home> echo . > .sitecopyrc

Step 2: Prepare the FTP site

Go to the FTP site, and create a directory. In my particular example, I created darcs/hoogle so I could mirror the Hoogle repo.

Step 3: Configure Sitecopy

Edit the file "c:\home\.sitecopyrc" to contain:

site          hoogle
   server     ftp.york.ac.uk
   username   ndm500
   local      C:\Neil\hoogle
   remote     web/darcs/hoogle
   port       21

Obviously, substituting in your relevant details.

Step 4: Initialise Sitecopy

Type:

sitecopy --init hoogle

darcs push

Now to do a darcs push, you can type:

sitecopy --update hoogle

The first copy will take a long time, but subsequent copies should be a lot faster.

darcs pull

After all this, you can either pull using FTP, or if your FTP is also a web site, you can pull over http. For example:

darcs get http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~ndm500/darcs/hoogle/