Creating an SVN View Repo

Situation: I have a project that requires data from several different SVN repositories. The projects are related, and the repositories are large, and I don’t want to grab everything—and I don’t want the pieces that I do grab sitting in different directory trees. Instead, I’d like a single tree with a view of the directories that I need—and nothing else.

I can do this with SVN externals.

I got the answer for how to do it from here. So props to Artem Russakovskii, the author of the blog.

Here’s my test. I decided to grab segments of two different repos, and put them in different places. First: two pieces of a single repo. Then a piece of another.

1. I went to Unfuddle, my SVN host, and created a new repository: dtrace1

2. I created a local directory and checked it out:

svn checkout http://<path_to_repo> .

Remember the dot at the end!

3. I created a file externals.txt

sub1/host http://<path_to_repo>/<path_to_host_dir>
sub1/silly/notes http://<path_to_repo>/<path_to_notes_dir>


This will put the contents of the host dir in sub1/host; the contents of the notes dir in sub1/silly/notes

None of the directories existed.

4. I processed the externals with:

svn propset svn:externals -F externals.txt .

5. I pushed externals.txt and the processed externals definition to the repository with

svn commit –m “created externals”

6. Then I did

svn checkout

And voila! The two directories appeared just where they were supposed to.

7. Then I added this line to externals.txt

sub3/src http://<path_to_second_repo>/<path_to_src_dir>

to get the contents of the src directory in a second repo.

Then I repeated:

• svn propset svn:externals –F externals.txt
• svn commit –m “added a second repo”
• svn checkout

The first two directories were skipped because they were up to date, and the new one was created.

Sweet!