Setting Up Subversion

Installing

In order to do the exercises in this course, you'll have to get Subversion working on your machine. If you are using Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, or some other kind of Unix, open a shell window and type which svn to see whether Subversion is installed. If it isn't, you must either install it yourself (if you have administrative rights), or ask your sys admins to install it for you.

If you are using Windows, you will need to install the Cygwin toolkit in order to do the exercises in this course. Follow the instructions on the installing Cygwin page; make sure that you select subversion from the Devel group. Once you are done, you should have a Cygwin shell icon on your desktop. Double-click this, and type which svn at the prompt to make sure that Subversion has been installed.

If you prefer graphical tools to the command line, several Subversion GUIs are available. I have added notes, screenshots, and links to the version control lecture page to help you get started. (I'm personally fond of TortoiseSVN, but RapidSVN and SmartSVN work just as well.)

Your Repository

Once you have Subversion set up on your machine, the next step is to check out a working copy of your repository. If you are using Subversion from the command line, you can do this by typing:

svn checkout https://www.third-bit.com/svn/2005fall/yourid course

where yourid is the ID sent to you by email, such as cdarwin or mcurie, and course is what you want Subversion to call the directory into which it puts the working copy. You only need to use the svn checkout command the first time you want a working copy of your repository: after that, you will go into the directory it creates for you (called course), and use svn status, svn update, and svn commit to manage your files.

If you are using a GUI, the steps are similar. For example, with TortoiseSVN, you right-click on the folder that you want your working copy checked out into, and select "SVN Checkout...":

You then specify the URL of your repository:

TortoiseSVN will ask you for your user ID and password:

Enter these, click "OK", and you're done.

The steps for the other GUIs are similar. Note that no matter how you get your working copy, it will initially be empty, since you haven't created any files.