SVN sync

SVN has a very nice sync feature.  I have used at the end of a project to hand over by coping the version control information to a client repository.

I normally use TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN to access the SVN repository but for this you you need an SVN client.  I used the the SlikSVN client with the typical configuration since they are selling hosting they are likely to make sure it works well (I used CVSDude way back now its unclear if it is called Codesion or Collabnet).  This has the svnsync command in it.

I got started with a post by Paul Querna.  Since I was doing it on a Windows machine and had a couple of problems I have written about my experience here.

Instead of defining environment variables I just created a number of batch files.   The first to make sure my SVN environment is working:

"C:\Program Files\SLIKSVN\bin\svn" --version

This command should return the version and a whole lot more info.  Then I tested access to the destination and source repositories eg:

"C:\Program Files\SLIKSVN\bin\svn" list https://myAcct.svn.cvsdude.com/myProj –username secretUser --password

secretPW

or

"C:\Program Files\SLIKSVN\bin\svn" list svn://192.168.0.0.1/myProj –-username secretUser -–password secretPW

This will return nothing for the destination repository as nothing in it and the  list of directories in the source repository.  If the hook properties need to be changed then the following code should be executed in the root directory of the source repository:

$ echo "#!/bin/sh" > hooks/pre-revprop-change

$ chmod 755 hooks/pre-revprop-change

Now you are ready to initialise syncserve:

"C:\Program Files\SLIKSVN\bin\svnsync" init svn://192.168.0.1/myProj --sync-username desSecretUser --sync-password destSecretPassword https://myAcct.svn.cvsdude.com/myProj --source-username sourceSecretUser --source-password sourceSecretPassword --non-interactive

You may get a warning about no supporting atomic revision and upgrading to 1.7.  For 1.6 this was fine.

svnsync: warning: W200007: Target server does not support atomic revision property edits; consider upgrading it to 1.7 or using an external locking program
Copied properties for revision 0.

And now you should be ready to start the sync (just change init to sync):

"C:\Program Files\SLIKSVN\bin\svnsync" sync svn://192.168.0.1/myProj --sync-username desSecretUser --sync-password destSecretPassword https://myAcct.svn.cvsdude.com/myProj --source-username sourceSecretUser --source-password sourceSecretPassword --non-interactive

You will then get a list of changes copied over (the . after Transmitted file data refer to the amount of data transferred):

Copied properties for revision 9.

Transmitting file data …..

Commited revision 9.