I’ve used Subversion for years and didn’t really want to move to Visual SourceSafe. Subversion does everything I need it to and I’ve never felt the need to move and be locked in to anything else. Unfortunately running windows meant I needed to find a way of installing Subversion on a windows box and running it as a server, I didn’t want to run Apache just for the sake of it. So here it is, my install technique for installing, running and managing repositories on Windows. One point to make, is that this guide uses Tortoise SVN to manage the repository. I could probably have done it just as easily from the command line but I have Tortoise installed so why make life hard.

1. Download and install the latest version of SVN setup.
2. Create a directory on the c: drive to hold the repository (i.e c:\svnrepo)
3. Extract SVNService.exe to the same directory as svnserve.exe
4. Install SVNService as a service using the following command SVNService -install -d -r c:\svnrepo
5. Start the service from Windows Manage Computer

Creating a repository

1. Create folder inside your SVN Repository (c:\svnrepo) in this example we’ll create folder called test.
2. Create a temporary drive locally containing 3 folders; trunk, branches, tags
3. Right click on the parent folder and got to TortoiseSVN > Import
4. In the URL box at the top enter the path to the repository, i.e. svn://<server>/test
5. This will import the 3 folders into the chosen repository.

Adding a Project to a repository

If you already have some files for a project that you have started that you wish to import into your new repository, please follow these steps.

1. Browse to the parent folder of the files you wish to install.
2. Right click this folder and choose TortoiseSVN > Import.
3. This time we want to import the file into the main trunk, so the path to the repository will be svn://<server>/test/trunk

Checking out the repository.

Now we have the project imported into SVN we need to check out a local copy to work on.

1. Browse to the parent directory of where you want to checkout the project to.
2. Right click and choose SVN Checkout
3. This will bring up the Checkout window. Enter the URL of the Repository in the top box (remember we want to checkout the trunk so this needs to go at the end). The checkout directory will default to the directory we clicked in 2, add the name of the subdirectory you wish to check the files out to at the end.
4. Click OK, if the directory you specified does not exist you will be prompted to create the directory, do so.
5. All the files will be checked out into the folder you specified. There will also be hidden folders beginning with .svn created in the directories, DO NOT delete these as they are used by Subversion. You can now work on your local copy.