Accessing a remote CVS server over ssh

A lot of pages discuss using the pserver method to remotely access CVS, but my web hosting provider doesn’t allow pserver and I have a shell account anyway so I just wanted to use ssh. It’s quite easy once you know the trick – here’s an example of a checkout from a remote server:

cvs -d :ext:myuser@myhost:/home/myuser/cvsroot co mymodule

This works over rsh or ssh (you set the method in the CVS_RSH environment variable). You can use this to setup a nifty alias like:

alias dhcvs='cvs -d :ext:myhost:/home/myuser/cvsroot'

I don’t specify a user name because myhost is an entry in my ~/.ssh/config which includes User, IdentityFile, etc…

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