SVN Tutorial

SVN stands for Subversion. It is an open source revision control software and is a modern replacement of CVS.

why do we need version control?

• to collaborate .. to find out who made changes to code.. also multiple developers can share commit code and can have latest code from repository.
• To rollback ..rollback is easy!

If you are looking for svn reference in main pages, you have gone to the wrong place. To check the references of svn commands, simply do this:

$ svn help

To get help on checkout,

$ svn help checkout

Creating the repository

$ svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /home/user/repository/ecomp1

This creates a bunch of files and directories in /home/user/repository/ecomp1. You can go there and do a ls but it won't be very explicit to you. Actually, you should not look at /home/user/repository/ecomp1 as a regular directory but rather as a virtual one whose content is far different from the "real" one displayed by ls. To see this virtual directory, type :

$ svn ls file:///home/user/repository/ecomp1

above command will return nothing as we haven't checked in anything.

svn uses the terminology URL. So URL in above case is 'file://...'

A point to remember
Every directory in a working copy contains a subdirectory named .svn. SVN depends on this file to manage your working directory. Come what may you should not make any changes in this file. This file exists in all working directories even though you might not see it if you execute ls command.