Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 4: Pragmatic Version Control

This is the fourth and final part in my series of posts covering command-line Subversion. In Part 3 I promised to return and talk a little bit about using version control sensibly and appropriately, so this is me finally getting around to it.

A lot of these points aren't specific to command-line Subversion, or even Subversion in general, but are based on a good few years of working with version control, and may just make your life a little bit easier all the same.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 3: Subversion Properties

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the basics of command-line Subversion, and Part 2 covered importing, branching and merging. In this third part I'd like to introduce a useful and very powerful Subversion feature, which isn't always terribly well understood by developers: that of Subversion Properties.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 2: Importing, Branching and Merging

In Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 1: The Basics, I covered many of the more common svn commands, and hopefully illustrated a typical SVN workflow.

This time around I'd like to tackle some of the commands involved in managing a project within a Subversion repository, specifically those that you'll need in order to import a project to a repository, and to branch and merge a project's codebase.

Command-Line Subversion Tutorial, Part 1: The Basics

I'm constantly surprised by how many experienced developers are completely unfamiliar with using version control - such as Subversion or CVS - from the command line, instead preferring to rely on graphical clients such as TortoiseSVN.

Don't get me wrong - Tortoise has its uses - but I strongly recommend that any professional developer familiarise themselves with command-line version control. It's simpler, quicker and a thousand times more powerful.

In this post I'd like to help those developers out by covering the basics of command-line Subversion usage, via the svn command. I've optimistically named the post "Part 1" in the hope that I'll manage a follow-up post one day, covering more advanced issues such as merging and resolving conflicts. For now though, let's have a look at the basics.