SVN

This is a very short tutorial — it should take you about 15 minutes from start to end — that explains how to run your own SVN server, install WebSVN, which is a web front-end to browse your SVN repository, and apply Drupal syntax highlighting to it.

An example can be seen used to be online at websvn.wimleers.com.

SVN {#svn}

I run my own SVN repository, because it’s much faster (svn:// FTW), I don’t have size limitations, I can ensure it’s backed up properly and because it’s so easy. I’m going to assume you’ve already installed svn on your (Linux) server.

First, decide where you’re going to put all your SVN repositories. I put mine at /data/svn. Whenever I use the e command, use your favorite editor instead (for me e is an alias for TextMate). Then go through these simple steps:

cd /data/svn
svnadmin create reponame

Create a SVN repository with the name reponame. This creates a certain directory structure.

I keep all my Drupal sites up-to-date by updating a single Drupal core instance and one install profile. And I keep Drupal core and all modules in this install profile updated through CVS. But then a problem poses: what if a file was added to or removed from CVS? Until now, you’d have to manually svn add or svn rm the file. And in the case of some modules (e.g. Views), that’s a lot of files you’ll have to check.

The solution: syncvsvn {#solution}

I’m aware that this probably isn’t the best name, but it gets the job done :).

Suppose you’ve just updated the xmlsitemap module:

For several courses at the university, we’ve got projects going on (actually, 5 simultaneously…) and for most of them, we have to write fairly large documents. We also have to work in groups of 2, 3 or 5. So collaborative writing becomes a necessity. Finally, in the group of 5, we work on 4 different operating systems. So whichever solution we pick, it must seamlessly work on any platform as well.

We chose LyX.

• LyX is a WYSIWYM GUI to write LaTeX documents.
• LyX is written in Qt, a cross-platform GUI toolkit (the most awesome one, if you ask me!), which makes it possible to use it on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux.
• To make LyX collaborative, we use the SVN version control system (which is also cross-platform).

This is how we started. But some problems emerged: