SVN Tutorial fo Unix

This tutorial is meant to be read linearly so that it introduces the important notions gently.

Local repository

We first consider the situations where the repository is on the machine you are working on, that is it is accessible through the filesystem.

Creating the repository

Run the command :

svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /home/user/svn

This creates a bunch of files and directories in /home/user/svn. 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/svn 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/svn

This will return nothing because, well, we have not put anything into it right now! We will see later how to add things. For the moment, look at the command we have typed. We have used the standard ls command but we have used it as a svn command. This is an important aspect of svn : it allows you to manipulate files and directory (i.e. create, delete, move) with commands similar to the standard ones. So you really have the feeling you are just working with files but this is just the way svn presents them to you. Internally those files are managed with a database that is stored in the files you saw when listing the /home/user/svn/ directory. This virtual directory structure can be anywhere : on the local filesystem, on a remote machine, or even on a web server. For that reason, instead of talking of "filepath" for these virtual directories, svn uses the terminology URL. The URL must be prefixed to indicate how the repository should be accessed. That's why we have the file:// prefix. We will see other examples later. For the moment let's play with the virtual directory structure.