Version Control With Subversion (SVN) For Beginners

Posted On: April 3, 2009 at 7:26 a.m. by Neum

Why Use Version Control?

Version control or “source code control” poses many advantages and efficiencies for both teams and individuals. Lets look at a few examples from my own experience. Note that these are from long ago. This wouldn’t happen to me now. I use Subversion!

Its late on a Friday and I’m in a hurry to get the weekend started. I make several changes to a file on the web server for a busy e-commerce website and take off. Several hours later I realize to my horror that the entire website is down. I’m not using Subversion (or any version control for that matter) and so my local copy in Dreamweaver of the file is the new one and its been closed. There is no undo. After several calls I’m luckily able to locate a member of the team who has the old, working file and they are able to upload it to the server.

There are tons of other examples, especially if you work in a team. Ever had someone else FTP a file up over changes that you had made previously? I finally got so fed up with having my work destroyed that it drove me to look for a better way of working together, which I’m guessing is the same reason you’re reading this post. Here are a few more reasons to use version control.

• You’re using Dreamweaver file locking. Ouch, I feel for you. After a year of “I overrode your lock on xyz file because you didn’t check it in last night, hope that was ok?” “No, buddy it wasn’t OK, I was working on it, hence the reason its CHECKED OUT.”
• You value your data, at all.
• You like the idea of having the biggest UNDO button in the world.
• You work with any size team on any project. It doesn’t have to be code!
• You want to know who made a change, when the change was made, and (hopefully) why.
• You want to be able to go “back in time” to generate prior releases for customers or yourself.

Version Control is Mandatory on All Pageworthy Projects. We Suggest You Make it Mandatory on Your Projects As Well.

Why Use Subversion

So now that you’re sold on using a version control system, why use Subversion. There are lots of version control systems out there and we’re not going to dig into comparisons between the different systems here. Here’s a few of the reasons we like Subversion, but probably the biggest reason we use it over other systems is the large user base, which cuts down on the blank stares.

• Versioning for Files, Directories and Metadata
• Atomic Commits and Changesets - Sounds complicated but it just means that you can never get half a change. Everyone on the team always sees a consistent view of the repository.
• SVN groups all changes into a revision (or changeset) and assigns a revision number. This helps you better organize and track changes over time.
• Great Networking Support
• Cheap Branching, Tagging and Merging - This is what set SVN apart from the earlier CVS system.
• Cross Platform Support - Whether you prefer Mac, Linux or Windows subversion will work for you.