What is SVN ? Why is it required ? You might be wondering. While developing applications for the web or any other area, most of us would be trying and testing the code on our local machines, sometimes it happens, while in the flow of coding, we tend to do some drastic changes to the sourcecode (atleast I do) only to find out that the application is not executing anymore after that. It becomes difficult to backtrack and eventually, we end up wasting a lot of time and energy, this is where SVN comes to our rescue.

Definition according to Wikipedia :
Subversion (SVN) is a version control system initiated in 2000 by CollabNet Inc. It is used to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly-compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS).

Index :

• Page 1 : Introduction
• Page 2 : Unpack and Install Subversion
• Page 3 : Configure Apache
• Page 4 : Install TortoiseSVN & Usage

Now, The Pre-Requisites :

1. Apache Webserver and Localhost configuration set up. To know how to setup the webserver for local use, read Tutorial : Installing Apache, PHP 5, MySQL 5 & PhpMyAdmin 2.11 in Windows Vista/XP
2. Subversion : Subversion is an open source version control system. We will be needing this package for the Win32 binaries for Apache 2.2.9 or higher to get a SVN setup up and running on your localhost. We can do version control using this package alone, but it is completely command line based.

   Click Here to goto Download Page.
   Please download the Subversion Win32 binaries for Apache 2.2.x (2.2.9 or higher is required within the 2.2.x series)

   For a direct link -> svn-win32-1.5.2.zip
   The latest release of Subversion is 1.5.2.

3. TortoiseSVN : TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows. It is based on Subversion, and has all the features of Subversion. It is GUI based, making our lives simpler.

   Click Here to goto Download Page.
   The latest release of TortoiseSVN is 1.5.3.

Introduction

I have given a jist of what SVN is, we can use SVN to keep track of web-pages, documents, source code and their versions. If we want to retrieve the previous version, we can always retrieve using SVN, Subversion was recognized as the sole leader in the Standalone Software Configuration Management (SCM) category and a strong performer in the Software Configuration and Change Management (SCCM) category.

There are 2 ways on how you can set up a SVN server on your system i.e use Subversion’s own server or integrate it with Apache. I am going to show you, how to integrate it with Apache. Once the SVN server is setup, we can use TortoiseSVN to perform all the operations, since it gets integrated into the windows shell.