Upgrade Subversion Client on Mac OSX

As a long-time Windows user and programmer, I cannot state enough just how great Mac OSX is as a development environment.  It comes with so many tools already installed as standard ready to go (or at the very least on the OSX install disk).

Like I said, mac osx comes with a subversion client out of the box. At least Leopard does. If you do not believe me, try the following command and watch the output:

svn, version 1.4.4 (r25188)
compiled May 31 2008, 03:45:57

Copyright (C) 2000-2006 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol.
- handles 'http' scheme
- handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
- handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
- handles 'file' scheme

However, as you can see, the default Subversion client (type: svn –version in a terminal window) is quite old.  The biggest problem to me is that I use Versions and that stops NetBeans IDE and the command-line client no longer work.  But no fear! It turns out it is very easy to update it.

  1. Head over to http://svnbinaries.open.collab.net/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=164&expandFolder=164&folderID=0 and grab the correct version of subversion for you, download and install it.  So long as the new version is higher than the old, you can just install and it will copy over the old version.
  2. Make sure that the new binaries are on the path before the original subversion libraries.  To do this, issue the following command in a terminal: export PATH=/opt/subversion/bin:$PATH

If you type: svn –version into a terminal window again you will now see the version you installed.

svn, version 1.5.4 (r33841)
   compiled Oct 27 2008, 11:19:10

Copyright (C) 2000-2008 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_neon : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using Neon.
  - handles 'http' scheme
  - handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
  - with Cyrus SASL authentication
  - handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
  - handles 'file' scheme
* ra_serf : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV protocol using serf.
  - handles 'http' scheme
  - handles 'https' scheme

Hope this post helps you use the new and improved subversion.