Subversion day to day

Subversion's Working Cycle

The normal working cycle in terms used by Subversion is:

# checkout/update
# test
# edit
# test
# commit

Getting Started

We can illustrate this working cycle using our example project. The sections below gives examples of common commands when using the command line client.

Checkout

The first step is to checkout a copy of the files:

svn checkout http://source.ggy.bris.ac.uk/subversion/myproject/trunk --user-name mylogin workingcopy

Where you can optionlly provide a user-name and the name of the directory/folder in which to create your local copy--in this case workingcopy.

Note that we specify trunk in the repository URL. The trunk distuinguishes these files from those which may exist on a branch of the repository. Branching is more advanced than we need concern ourselves with at the moment. For now, just note that we will be using the trunk at all times.

More Information

You can find out more about using Subversion and about it's more advanced features in the Subversion book.