Setting up Subversion on OS X

Posted on Thursday, July 19, 2007 @ 17:30 CET

So since the Vista machine is ~~dead~~ back to its factory state and I'm not that keen on setting up my dev environment again I decided to set up Subversion on the MacBook Pro. I don't mind using the command line, its great for lots of things, but for me SVN needs a good GUI like TortoiseSVN for Windows which integrates directly with Explorer. Luckily I found a similar tool for OS X called SCPlugin.

So this is what I did:

First get Subversion 1.4.4 for OS X from Martin Ott and install the package
Next get SCPlugin and install it (copy SCFinderPlugin.plugin to /Library/Contextual Menu Items/)
Restart the Finder by logging out or force quitting it (Command+Option+Escape). Right-click on a folder or anywhere in the Finder and you should see a new "Subversion" item at the bottom
Setup ssh key pairs on your machine and the server as described here. I left out this step at first and couldn't figure out why svn wasn't working over svn+ssh://
Test out your ssh keypair setup by ssh'ing to the server in Terminal.app

Once that's done goto the folder you want to use in the Finder. Right-click and select Subversion > Checkout. Type in your repository URL (e.g. svn+ssh://username@server.com/my/svn/repository) and click Checkout.

Now you can perform Subversion tasks right in the Finder which makes life easier. Versions looks promising, but its not out yet. RapidSVN and svnX just didn't do it for me.

Update (29.09.07) Like Jack comments below version 0.7 now supports username and password authentication and has a proper installer.

Update (28.02.08) Updated the install procedure here.

- paulo

Comments:

Jack Repenning writes:
There's a new release of SCPlugin available, verison 0.7. While it's still a beta, it's a huge advance,
and well worth updating. it comes with a proper installer, it's a Universal Binary, it no longer
needs a separate command-line client, and it doesn't even need (or have) a Preferences Panel!

Drop by http://scplugin.tigris.org/ for an update. While you're there, join our users@ list
(or email users-subscribe@scplugin.tigris.org).

# August 28, 2007 23:07 CET