HOWTO migrate a subversion repository to a new host

0Harry • 9th Jun 2010 • Software Development, Systems Administration • move, subversion. migrate, svn

I recently had to migrate a SVN repo to a new host aswell as moving it’s location on the server, this is how I did it.

On the existing server we’ll need to make a backup of the subversion repo:

$ svnadmin dump /home/current_repo_location > my_repo.dump
$ tar -zcvf /root/my_repo.tar.gz my_repo.dump

Depending on the size and age of your repository these two commands could take some time to complete.

Now log in to your to your new server

$ rsync -v -r –ignore-existing –delete -e ssh root@xxx:/root/my_repo.tar.gz /home/new_location/
$ tar -zxvvf /root/my_repo.tar.gz
$ svnadmin load my_repo.dump /home/new_location
$ cd /home/new_location
$ find . -path \*.svn/entries -exec perl -spi -le ‘s#current_location/project_name#new_location/project_name#’ ‘{}’ \;

That should do it.