Some people have trouble absorbing a new technology by reading the sort of “top down” approach provided by this book. This section is a very short introduction to Subversion, and is designed to give “bottom up” learners a fighting chance. If you prefer to learn by experimentation, the following demonstration will get you up and running. Along the way, we give links to the relevant chapters of this book.
If you're new to the entire concept of version control or to the “copy-modify-merge” model used by both CVS and Subversion, then you should read Chapter 2, Basic Concepts before going any further.
The following example assumes that you have svn, the Subversion command-line client, and svnadmin, the administrative tool, ready to go. It also assumes you are using Subversion 1.2 or later (run svn --version to check.)
Subversion stores all versioned data in a central repository. To begin, create a new repository:
$ svnadmin create /path/to/repos $ ls /path/to/repos conf/ dav/ db/ format hooks/ locks/ README.txt
This command creates a new directory
/path/to/repos
which contains a Subversion
repository. This new directory contains (among other things) a
collection of database files. You won't see your versioned
files if you peek inside. For more information about repository
creation and maintenance, see
Chapter 5, Repository Administration.
Subversion has no concept of a “project”. The repository is just a virtual versioned filesystem, a large tree that can hold anything you wish. Some administrators prefer to store only one project in a repository, and others prefer to store multiple projects in a repository by placing them into separate directories. The merits of each approach are discussed in the section called “Choosing a Repository Layout”. Either way, the repository only manages files and directories, so it's up to humans to interpret particular directories as “projects”. So while you might see references to projects throughout this book, keep in mind that we're only ever talking about some directory (or collection of directories) in the repository.
In this example, we assume that you already have some sort
of project (a collection of files and directories) that you wish
to import into your newly created Subversion repository. Begin
by organizing them into a single directory
called myproject
(or whatever you wish).
For reasons that will be clear later (see
Chapter 4, Branching and Merging), your project's tree
structure should contain three top-level directories
named branches
,
tags
, and
trunk
. The trunk
directory should contain all of your data,
while branches
and tags
directories are empty:
/tmp/myproject/branches/ /tmp/myproject/tags/ /tmp/myproject/trunk/ foo.c bar.c Makefile …
The branches
, tags
,
and trunk
subdirectories aren't actually
required by Subversion. They're merely a popular convention
that you'll most likely want to use later on.
Once you have your tree of data ready to go, import it into the repository with the svn import command (see the section called “svn import”):
$ svn import /tmp/myproject file:///path/to/repos/myproject -m "initial import" Adding /tmp/myproject/branches Adding /tmp/myproject/tags Adding /tmp/myproject/trunk Adding /tmp/myproject/trunk/foo.c Adding /tmp/myproject/trunk/bar.c Adding /tmp/myproject/trunk/Makefile … Committed revision 1. $
Now the repository contains this tree of data. As mentioned
earlier, you won't see your files by directly peeking into the
repository; they're all stored within a database. But the
repository's imaginary filesystem now contains a top-level
directory named myproject
, which in turn
contains your data.
Note that the original /tmp/myproject
directory is unchanged; Subversion is unaware of it. (In fact,
you can even delete that directory if you wish.) In order to
start manipulating repository data, you need to create a new
“working copy” of the data, a sort of private
workspace. Ask Subversion to “check out” a working
copy of the myproject/trunk
directory in
the repository:
$ svn checkout file:///path/to/repos/myproject/trunk myproject A myproject/foo.c A myproject/bar.c A myproject/Makefile … Checked out revision 1.
Now you have a personal copy of part of the repository in a
new directory named myproject
. You can edit
the files in your working copy and then commit those changes
back into the repository.
Enter your working copy and edit a file's contents.
Run svn diff to see unified diff output of your changes.
Run svn commit to commit the new version of your file to the repository.
Run svn update to bring your working copy “up-to-date” with the repository.
For a full tour of all the things you can do with your working copy, read Chapter 3, Guided Tour.
At this point, you have the option of making your repository available to others over a network. See Chapter 6, Server Configuration to learn about the different sorts of server processes available and how to configure them.