How do I export and then import a Subversion repository

Question

I m just about wrapped up on a project where I was using a commercial SVN provider to store the source code  The web host the customer ultimately picked includes a repository as part of the hosting package  so  now that the project is over  I d like to relocate the repository to their web host and discontinue the commercial account   How would I go about doing this

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Excerpt from my Blog-Note-to-myself   Now you can import a dump file e g  if you are migrating between machines   subversion versions  e g  if I had created a dump file from the source repository and load it into the new repository as shown below   Commands for Unix-like systems  from terminal    svnadmin dump  path to your old repo  gt  backup dump svnadmin load  path to your new repo  lt  backup dump dmp   Commands for Microsoft Windows systems  from cmd shell    svnadmin dump C  path to your old repo  gt  backup dump svnadmin load C  path to your old repo  lt  backup dump

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The tool to do that would be   svnadmin dump   But for this to work  you need filesystem-access to the repository  And once you have that  and provided the repository is in FSFS format   you can just copy the repository to its new location  if it s in BDB format  dump load is strongly recommended    If you do not have filesystem access  you would have to ask your repository provider to provide the dump for you  and make them delete their repository - and hope they comply

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Assuming you have the necessary privileges to run svnadmin  you need to use the dump and load commands

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You can also use the svnadmin hotcopy command   svnadmin hotcopy OLD REPOS PATH NEW REPOS PATH   It takes a full backup from repository  including all hooks  configuration files  etc   More at SVN Book

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Basically  there are plenty of ways to accomplish the task  The topic is covered in depth in SVNBook   Migrating Repository Data Elsewhere  so I suggest reading the book s section   Here is a brief description of your options    It depends on your environment  but there is a great chance that you can simply copy the repository to the new server and it will work  You have to revise repository hook scripts after copying the repo to ensure that they are working as you expect  You can use svnadmin dump and svnadmin load commands to  ehm  generate full dump and then load it to another repository on another server  You will need to svnadmin create a new clean repository to load the dump into it  Keep in mind that the approach deals with repository history only and does not move hook scripts and repository configuration files  As well  you must have read filesystem access to the original repository to dump it  Since Subversion 1 7  svnrdump tool is available  Generally speaking  it mimics svnadmin dump and svnadmin load functionality  but operates remotely  You are not required to have read   write filesystem access to original and target repositories as tool operates remotely like Subversion client  e g  over HTTPS protocol  So you need to have read access to original repository and read   write to the target one  Another option is to use svnadmin hotcopy command  The command is mostly used for backup purpose  it creates full copy of the repository including configuration and hook scripts  You can move hotcopied repository to another server then

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I found an article about how to move svn repositories from a hosting service to another  and how to do local backups    Define where you will store your repositories   mkdir   repo MYREPO  home me someplace    you should use full path here  Now create a empty svn repository with svnadmin create  MYREPO Create a hook file and make it executable   echo     bin sh   gt   MYREPO hooks pre-revprop-change chmod  x  MYREPO hooks pre-revprop-change  Now we can start importing the repository with svnsync  that will initialize a destination repository for synchronization from another repository   svnsync init file    MYREPO http   your svn repo here   And the finishing touch to transfer all pending revisions to the destination from the source with which it was initialized   svnsync sync file    MYREPO    There now you have a local svn repository in the   repo directory   Source    http   kylecordes com 2007 svnsync-svn-backup http   www workhabit com blog moving-svn-repository-hosted-service

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If you do not have file access to the repository  I prefer rsvndump  remote Subversion repository dump  to make the dump file

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You might find some help on migrating SVN repositories in Chapter 5  Repository Administration  Migrating a repository   This approach requires access to svnadmin

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rsvndump worked great for me migrating a repository from svnrepository com to an Ubuntu server that I control   How to install and use rsvndump on Ubuntu    Install missing dependencies   APR  and Subversion libraries   sudo apt-get install apache2-threaded-dev sudo apt-get install libsvn-dev  Install rsvndump  wget http   prdownloads sourceforge net rsvndump rsvndump-0 5 5 tar gz tar xvfz rsvndump-0 5 5 tar gz cd rsvndump-0 5 5   configure make sudo make install  Dump the remote SVN repository to a local file  rsvndump http   my svnrepository com svn old repo  gt  old repo dump  Create a new repository and load in the local dump file  sudo svnadmin create  opt subversion my new rep sudo svnadmin load --force-uuid  opt subversion my new repo  lt  old repo dump

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You can also use svnsync  This only requires read-only access on the source repository  more at svnbook

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If you want to move the repository and keep history  you ll probably need filesystem access on both hosts   The simplest solution  if your backend is FSFS  the default on recent versions   is to make a filesystem copy of the entire repository folder   If you have a Berkley DB backend  if you re not sure of what your backend is  or if you re changing SVN version numbers  you re going to want to use svnadmin to dump your old repository and load it into your new repository   Using svnadmin dump will give you a single file backup that you can copy to the new system   Then you can create the new  empty  repository and use svnadmin load  which will essentially replay all the commits along with its metadata  author  timestamp  etc    You can read more about the dump load process here   http   svnbook red-bean com en 1 8 svn reposadmin maint html svn reposadmin maint migrate  Also  if you do svnadmin load  make sure you use the --force-uuid option  or otherwise people are going to have problems switching to the new repository   Subversion uses a UUID to identify the repository internally  and it won t let you switch a working copy to a different repository   If you don t have filesystem access  there may be other third party options out there  or you can write something  to help you migrate  essentially you d have to use the svn log to replay each revision on the new repository  and then fix up the metadata afterwards   You ll need the pre-revprop-change and post-revprop-change hook scripts in place to do this  which sort of assumes filesystem access  so YMMV   Or  if you don t want to keep the history  you can use your working copy to import into the new repository   But hopefully this isn t the case

[svn] How do I export (and then import) a Subversion repository?

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