Setting Up Subversion In An Instant

One of the biggest issues being pushed at this year's CFUNITED conference was the need for each and every one of us developers to be using some sort of source control.  I've since joined the converted faithful and have seen the light as to just how important source control is, especially when working in a team environment. 

Subversion is a free, easy-to-use, source control server with widespread support including direct integration with CFEclipse as well as the Windows file system.  This is my quick and easy guide to getting up and running and setting up your repositories.  It only takes a matter of seconds to setup each new repository instance, so hopefully this will allow everyone to get up and running in a jiffy.  Keep in mind that these directions are for Windows, but should be pretty similar for the Mac.

The first thing you'll need is a copy of the Subversion server.  This is where your repositories will sit and these will hold the master copies of all your code (along with any revisions).   You can download a copy here (the ones ending in '-setup' come with a friendly installer program).  Once installed, perform the steps below to get it running as a service:

1. Create a root directory to hold all of your repositories (e.g. c:\svnrepo).
2. Download the SVN Service Wrapper (alternate location) and unzip it to your c:\Program Files\Subversion\bin\ folder or wherever your SVNServe.exe is located.
3. Open a command prompt and type 'SVNService -install -d -r c:\svnrepo'.  The -d installs it as a daemon and the -r specifies that it will only server repositories located under the specified directory.
   

1. Go to the directory which you specified for your subversion repositories (c:\svnrepo) and create a new folder there - name it whatever you would like your repository to be called, typically the name of your project. 
   
2. Next, right-click on that folder and select Tortoise SVN from the context menu, then choose 'Create repository here...'  Select Native Filesystem at the prompt and you should then get a confirmation that everything was created OK. 
   
3. Double-click into that directory and you should now see 5 directories and 2 files.  Go into the conf directory and edit svnserve.conf.  Uncomment every line with only a single ## sign except for the line starting with 'authz-db', then save and exit.  You can change the 'anon-access' value to 'none' to disable read-access by all.
4. Edit the passwd file - remove the ## before [users] and replace the sample users with your own username/password combinations.

1. Right-click on the folder we first added (the one containing the conf and other directories), and select 'Tortoise SVN', then 'Repo-browser'.
2. Right-click anywhere in the main screen that pops up and select 'Create folder...'  Standard convention specifies 3 directories for the top-level:  trunk, tags, and branches.  Create those now - enter 'trunk' as the name of the directory.  Each action performs a commit which requires a memo, so we'll use 'creating initial trunk directory'.  Do the same for tags and branches.

1. Right-click on the directory of your webroot and select 'Tortoise SVN' and then 'Import'. 
2. Enter the location of your Subversion repository (by default Subversion includes its own svn protocol).  It should look something like this: svn://your.ip.address/repos_name/trunk.  For the comment use 'initial trunk import'.