/harry-webster.co(.uk|m)/ » svn

HOWTO migrate a subversion repository to a new host

Harry — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:05:06 +0000

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.

Setting up a local subversion repo

Harry — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:26:00 +0000

First create the repository

$ svnadmin create /home/subversion/name_of_project

Then checkout thisproject into the directory where you’d like to work on it.

$ svn checkout file:///home/subversion/name_of_project /home/me/my_project

If you’re wanting to checkout this repo onto another server using SSH you can do this but running:

$ svn co svn+ssh://username@your.remote-server.com/home/subversion/name_of_project /home/me/my_project

In many cases none standard SSH ports are used, which can cause a problem connecting in this way, personally I resolved this by modifying my ~/.ssh/config like this:

[your.remote-server.com]
    User my_username
    Port 12345

This means that when you SSH to your SVN repo you’ll always connect using the username my_username and the SSH port 12345.