I recently had to install the subversion client in a shared hosting environment (specifically Bluehost, but these instructions probably work with other web hosts as well). It goes like this: 1) Add these lines into ~/.bash_profile export PYTHONPATH="$HOME/lib/python2.3/site-packages" export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/lib" 2) Download the subversion source code mkdir ~/src cd ~/src wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz tar -xzvf subversion-1.4.6.tar.gz tar -xzvf subversion-deps-1.4.6.tar.gz cd subversion-1.4.6 3) Compile dependencies cd apr ./configure --enable-shared [...]