How To Create A Subversion Repository

Install Subversion

If you haven't already installed subversion, you can download it from http://subversion.tigris.org/. You can download the svn package for a variety of platforms. If you download the source package, you should simply have to do the following as root:

• unpack the archive and enter that folder
• configure the application for your system by typing ./configure on the command line
• compile the source code by typing make
• install the package by typing make install

Note: these are the general steps for installing a package from the source; they may be slightly different with svn.

Choose A Home For The Repository

Next, choose a place for your server to keep track of all of the changes to your project. Try a place like /var/svn or /home/[your_username]/svn. I would recommend creating a folder specifically for the repository.

Create The Repository

Once you're in the directory in which you wish for your svn repository to reside, type the command svnadmin create repo or you can type the full path to be certain svnadmin create /var/svn/repo. This will create the repository.

Import Your Project

I do most of my development on my local area network, so I haven't created a repository that can be used over the Internet. I would imagine that it's pretty similar to what we do to create a repository for your LAN. Choose a project to import into your repository and navigate to the folder that the project is in. For example, if I have a project called Foo in /var/www/htdocs/foo, I would go to /var/www/htdocs. Next, use the command svn import to pull your project into the repository. For our Foo project, we would use the command svn import foo svn://localhost/var/svn/repo/foo -m "Initial Import". This will create a new folder in our repository at /var/svn/repo called foo (/var/svn/repo/foo). Our project files will put crammed into that directory for tracking.

Checkout Your Project

In order to be able to save your changes to our repository, we have to checkout the project again from the server. This is a pretty simple step, but it is critical. Even though we imported our project already, that folder remains untouched. SVN will not know how to handle the updates unless we checkout the project from the svn server. So, we proceed to checkout by removing or renaming /var/www/htdocs/foo and typing svn checkout svn://localhost/var/svn/repo/foo /var/www/htdocs/foo. This will place some hidden folders in each of the directories in your project. These hidden folders keep track of your local changes so that svn will know how to merge your changes with those of other developers.

Update The Repository

When you've made some changes that you want to save, you can send them out by typing svn commit /var/www/htdocs/foo. This command knows how to get to the server to save the changes, since the project was checked out from the repository.

Update Your Files

Sometimes you'll need to get changes that other developers have made, or revert back to a version of your project that didn't have as many problems. You can do this using the svn update command. If you're already in /var/www/htdocs/foo, you can type svn update and it will update files that have been changed in the repository since you last updated. If you're looking to get an older version of your project, you can type svn update -r PREV or a revision number in place of PREV.

Remember, these are just the basics of using SVN. You can do many amazing things with this utility. I actually did all of this as I was writing this article, so I'm sure that it works.