For those of you who do web development on the server or for any other reason that you might want a versioning system here is how to go about setting up CVS on this machine.

For starters you will need a shell acount. We don't deal with the pserver stuff so everything goes through local file system transports or over SSH if you are remote.

To use CVS, you need to tell CVS where your repository will be located. For instance, mine is in ~/cvs-rep. To tell CVS this set the environment variable CVSROOT. In csh or tcsh use:
setenv CVSROOT /home/username/cvs-rep

Later, when you want to access your repository from a computer at home such as your laptop you will want to set CVSROOT to be something like the following. This only works for Macs, *nix, and/or Cygwin setups. WinCVS users are on their own.
setenv CVSROOT :ext:username@norcalttora.com:/home/username/cvs-rep

The ext means that you'll be using some other protocol for transferring files (We'll use SSH). username is your login name on the server. norcalttora.com is the servername. And the final path is the path to the repository.

Let's make the repository directory now:
mkdir /home/username/cvs-rep
Now let's actually create our CVS repository:
cvs init

Wahoo. We're ready to get started. Change into the directory you want to add. For instance:

cd /www/docs/norcal cvs import norcal norcal norcal1 cd .. mv norcal norcal-old cvs co norcal

So what we did there was import everything in the norcal directory into a module called norcal. Then we ditched our original sources and checked out the module where it used to be. Hack away.

If you ever add a new file or directory to your bunch of files you need to add it to the repository like so:

cvs add *
cd mydirectory
cvs add *
cd ..
cvs commit


After you've added everything change back to the directory you started in and type cvs commit A Vi window will pop up and ask you for some text to type in. If you've never used Vi before it can be very daunting. Press the 'i' key and then type whatever you want to record in there. This bunch of text will be saved with these changes. Normally you will want to document what changes you made to this revision. Here something like "initial rev" would suffice. When you are done typing press <ESC> and then type :wq

Now if you want to work on your code from somewhere else you'll need to check out your stuff. Set up the CVSROOT environment variable as above and then type cvs co dirname where dirname is the name of the directory you first added.