Subversion: Add your project into Source Control

Contributed by johnnythawte September 21, 2006  
Tagged: Computer programming

A very common bit of confusion for newbies to Subversion is how to get your project into source control properly. This recipe should get you rolling.

We’re developing a killer application called MySuperTestApp that can make your coffee telepathically, but we need to make sure that we’ve got our source code safely versioned away in source control.

Our system administrator has already installed subversion, and told us the URL is http://svn.mysite.com/depot/ and our username is johnny.

We’ll begin by navigating to our application directory in our command prompt or terminal window. We’re going to import the directory into subversion first:

svn import MySuperTestApp http://svn.mysite.com/depot/mysupertestapp -m "Importing test app" --username johnny

Now we’ll need to backup our directory just in case:
mv MySuperTestApp MySuperBackup

Now we will checkout the subversion project so that we can start tracking our changes:
svn checkout http://svn.mysite.com/depot/mysupertestapp

Alright! Now we have a functional subversion project, and we can get back to work writing the coffee filter functionality.