“Please make sure your seat backs are in their full, upright position and that your tray tables are stored. Flight attendants, prepare for take-off….”
What follows is a quick tutorial that walks you through some basic Subversion configuration and operation. When you finish it, you should have a general understanding of Subversion's typical usage.
The examples used in this appendix assume that you have
svn, the Subversion command-line client,
and svnadmin, the administrative tool,
ready to go on a Unix-like operating system. (This tutorial
also works at the Windows command-line prompt, assuming you
make some obvious tweaks.) We also assume 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 /var/svn/repos $ ls /var/svn/repos conf/ dav/ db/ format hooks/ locks/ README.txt
This command creates a new directory,
/var/svn/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. We discuss the merits of each approach in the section called “Planning Your Repository Organization”. Either way, the repository manages only 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 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 your data into a single directory called
myproject (or whatever you wish). For
reasons explained in 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, and the branches and
tags directories should be 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 “Getting Data into Your Repository”):
$ svn import /tmp/myproject file:///var/svn/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.) 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:///var/svn/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 2, Basic Usage.
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.