A Glass case of Thoughts » SVN

SVN : Preparing for branching/ Merging process

Jyotsna — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:38:36 +0000

Preparing your repository for branching and merging can turn into a headache when you do it for the first time. This is a small .. may be obvious .. note to everybody who can get some help

My setup

SVN Server hosted on linux
Tortoise SVN as client being used from windows

If you perform following checks before getting into the process of branching and merging, you are going to save a lot of time and efforts trying to figure out errors messages and causes

Make sure your SVN Server version is above 1.5. If not, UPGRADE. In my case it was 1.4.2 and I upgraded it to 1.6.* from Collabnet

Make sure your SVN Repository version is upgraded. You can find that out by using following commands
```
cd /path/to/repo/reponame
cd db
cat format
```
i.e. changing to repo/directory/db and looking at contents of format file. For 1.4.*, format file showed 2, which should be 4 for it to be a 1.6.* repository. I had to upgrade the repository version by using
```
svnadmin upgrade path/to/repo/reponame
```

Make sure your SVN Client is equipped to handle features offered by the upgraded SVN Server. I just downloaded version of tortoise svn made for 1.6 version

After these checks, you can choose the model you want to opt for your process and get started.

In my case, I chose mainline development happening in trunk, creating branches after each phase release. Every-time a bug is fixed in a branch, its committed to its corresponding branch. Then from trunk, using TortoiseSVN’s “reintegrate a branch” option, I choose repository URL of branch and follow through steps to finish the merge. It works wonders !

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SVN : Utility commands

Jyotsna — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:00:24 +0000

List of SVN utility commands that I needed to use frequently apart from commit and update. Feel free to add to the list

Know SVN binary path
```
which svn
```
Know SVN server version installed
```
svnadmin --version
```
Know SVN Client server version installed
```
svn --version
```
Create SVN Respository
```
svnadmin create path/to/repository/reponame
```
You can then assign permissions to reponame directory like you do on any other directory
Upgrade SVN Respository version
```
svnadmin upgrade path/to/repository
```

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tortoise SVN: Copy a SVN bound directory to another repository

Jyotsna — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:54:39 +0000

Task at hand:
Copy a directory from within one SVN repository to another

Assumptions:
- Tortoise SVN as SVN client
- The two SVN repositories – being copied from and being copied to already exist

Steps:
1. Right click SVN bound directory that you with to copy. Choose tortoise SVN -> Export.
2. Specify path to an empty folder e.g. “c:\to_add”. Click on OK.
3. Now you have the SVN bound directory contents in this new directory “to_add”.
4. Right click on “to_add” and choose tortoise svn -> add
5. Specify path to the new repository and location inside it.
6. Right click on “to_add” and choose SVN Commit to make your changes permanent.

Voila !! You are done.

How to make SVN remember password

Jyotsna — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:24:24 +0000

Who is this post for?

This post is for anyone who wants a step by step guide to accomplish any of the following

Make a SVN client like tortoise svn remember password
Make linux server remember your password when logging through putty

Tools you need:

Putty
Puttygen

What you need to do:

Using putty – login to linux server. change directory to ~/.ssh/ by typing following command
```
cd ~/.ssh
```
Type command
```
ssh-keygen -b 1024 -t dsa 
```
and press enter. Do not enter a passphrase. Hit enter when prompted for one. Same for the filename. default filename = id_dsa and id_dsa.pub. id_dsa is the private key file and id_dsa.pub is the public key file.
type command
```
cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub
```
Copy the output to the clipboard by selecting the output by mouse.
Type command
```
vi ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
```
Hit i to enter Insert mode and then paste your public key (if there is already a key in this file, move to the bottom before pasting). Hit the ESC key to leave Insert mode and type :wq and hit enter to save and exit vi editor.
Using ftp download your key files – both private and public

In order to use the private key we get from the server, we have to convert it to a putty format. This is because the private key file format is not specified by some standard body. We can accomplish this using puttygen. Open Puttygen

In the tree structure on left, choose conversion -> import key -> choose the private key file downloaded from ftp

Choose to save private key. Choose path and save the file as anything.ppk

Run Putty. Specify parameters
- Session->HostName: Hostname or IP Adress of your server
- Session->Protocol: SSH
- Session->Saved Sessions: MyConnection
- SSH->Prefered SSH Protocol version: 2
- SSH->Auth->Private Key file for auth: $PATH$mykey.PKK (replace $PATH$ with real path to the mykey.PKK file)
Go back to Session tab and hit “save” button. You will see “MyConnection” in the list of available connections.

Next click “open” and you should see a telnet login prompt. Use “myuser” as username (without double quotes of course) and if everything is OK, you don’t have to provide a password to your system. If the system still requires a password, something went wrong.

Now that linux server and putty manage to remember your password, you need an application client to use it. In this case it is SVN client e.g. tortoise svn. Go to TortoiseSVN->RepoBrowser and specify a URL like this:
```
svn+ssh://myuser@MyConnection/usr/local/repos
```
…where MyConnection is the putty session name and /usr/local/repos is my svn repository on linux server

And you are done …

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