Setting up
Subversion
for
revision control
can be a bit frustrating. There are a million sites talking about how to do
it, but many of them are contradictory and/or overly complex. Here’s a
simple approach that works for me every time.

Create Your Repository

svnadmin create /Repository

This utilizes the svnadmin that creates the main directory that your
projects will reside in.

Create Your Project

svn mkdir file:///Repository/danielmiessler.com

Notice that you can’t just create this with regular mkdir. You need the svn
bit. This won’t create an actual directory under /Repository, by the way.
Don’t worry, it’s there. You can view it with svn list file:///Repository.

Populate Your Repository (Import)Go into your web directory and run:

svn import . file:///Repository/danielmiessler.com -m “Initial Import”

This pulls a copy of your website into your working development directory.

Check Out a Copy to a Temporary DirectoryChange directory into /tmp
and run:

svn co file:///Repository/danielmiessler.com

This pulls a copy of your website from your development repository to your
temporary location.

Move That Temporary Working Copy Next To Your Web Directory Move your
temp copy next to your web directory, then go one directory higher than your
web directory and run:

mv htdocs htdocs_backup

Make The Switch

mv danielmiessler.com htdocs

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This puts your subversion copy of your site where your
non-version-controlled version used to be.

Check Out a Copy To Work With On Your Development SystemInstall
subversion on your client and cd into your dev directory (I use OS X).

svn co svn+ssh://user@danielmiessler.com/Repository/danielmiessler.com

This pulls a copy of your repository down to your development machine.
Notice that you’ll now have a copy of the site in that directory. This is
the version of the site that you’ll be making changes to.

Use TextMate To Edit Your Local VersionJust a recommendation of
course, but a strong recommendation. Download and install
TextMate
to edit your copy of the site. File –> New Project. Drag and drop your
site’s directory into the folder pane.Once you’ve made some changes, you can
use TextMate’s built-in subversion support. Make a change to your code and
then press shift-control-A, which allows you to select “commit” to update
the repository.

[Optional] Configure an Automatic svn upIf you don’t do this trick
you’ll have to go into the root of your web directory on the server and run
svn up to get the changes from the repository into production.

This allows you to bypass that by making use of subversion’s post-commit
hook. Essentially, anything in that post-commit hook script gets run right
as you check in from the client (commit). So what we do is make use of a
little C++ program that will run the svn up for us. Here’s the code:

include 

include 

include 

int main(void)
{
  execl("/usr/local/bin/svn", "svn", "update", "/home/joe/public_html/",
        (const char *) NULL);
  return(EXIT_FAILURE);
}

gcc -o svn_update svn_update.cpp

Then just point to it from your post-commit script (be sure to remove the
template suffix).

So now when you make a change you just commit it and it’s live on the
site.  All with the protection of being able to roll back your various
changes if  you need to.: