Have your ICE repository hosted using Google Project hosting

I'll start by introducing myself, my name is Daniel de Byl I have been the project officer for ICE at the University of Southern Queensland for the past 1 ½ years. It should be obvious if you are reading this that I have just setup a blog for the ICE developers using Googles blogger. However, my first post is not going to be about the blog but rather that you can use the recently released Google code project hosting as an ICE repository.

Thanks to Peter, as he mentioned the release of Google Project Hosting late on Friday afternoon, after a few clicks and a little brain strain about what to call the project we setup ice-sandbox. At the time we couldn't browse or checkout the content but that was either because we were using a proxy as it worked from home or there was another problem going by the discussion forum.

There's only the small issue of storage space as it is 100mb (which is odd considering email storage is Gbs), and your content is publicly accessible. The storage space is a little concerning as you can't technically delete content from a subversion repository, so what happens when you exceed it.

Setup an ICE repository on Google

So how do you setup a Google project repository for use with ICE? Here are a few steps.

Step 1: Setup a Google project

log into Google and goto http://code.google.com/hosting/ (if you need a gmail account let me know)
create a project
checkout out your project using Subversion (Mac users use svn 1.3), for example
svn co https://your-project.googlecode.com/svn/ your-project

Step 2: Add ICE site files

In your project directory add the .site, .skin and templates folders from the ICE sample content folder by:

cd your-project svn export http://ice-sandbox.googlecode.com/svn/sample-content content

Step 3: Configure ICE

Start ICE and goto http://localhost:8000/edit-config
Click add and enter the following:
Name: Your-Project
Path: (directory location of your-project)
URL: https://your-project.googlecode.com/svn/content
click save and restart the ICE server
then goto http://localhost:8000 (switch repositories if you have multiple)