Ladysign

SVN on a USB Stick

Difficulty:
Toirtoise SVN, is a SVN version control client for windows.
The handy thing about SVN, is that you can work with your whole team on certain files,
and always can track the correct version of it.
Normally you would install SVN on a server, so your whole team can access it.
But when you don’t have a team? You still want to track your file versions, but a whole
server is not required. You can also use your USB stick!
Here is how it works. (Though I require a USB stick with enough space, incase you want to carry multiple/large projects with you.)

1. Download and install subversion
   http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=8100
2. Download and install Tortoise SVN for windows:
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/tortoisesvn/files/Application/1.6.5/TortoiseSVN-1.6.5.16974-win32-svn-1.6.5.msi/download
3. Create a new repository
   Create a folder using Windows Explorer, let’s say it’s called D:\Repositories\Standard. (Note that in this case I called the project “Standard”,
   but you can use whatever you want.)
   This folder should be located on your USB Drive, because this is the part that you’ll be dragging around with you.
   Open that folder and right click on the client area, select TortoiseSVN and then Create repository here. Choose the native file system option.
4. Create a working copy
   Right click on the My Documents folder (or any folder of your choosing), and select SVN Checkout from the popup menu.
   In this example, I’ve called the repository that I created in step 2 Standard.
   In the URL of repository field, fill in a URL that points to the newly created repository, i.e. file:///F:/Repositories/Standard.
   (Make sure you are pointing to the correct drive. In my case the USB stick is F:)
   A window should pop up stating that it has completed at revision 0.
5. Use it
   Now go into your recently checked out folder, and right click on them and from the TortoiseSVN menu, select Add.
   This command will mark the files for addition to the repository.
   To complete the add, right on the client area and select SVN Commit. This will add all the files marked for addition to the repository and commit new versions of files already in the repository.

So that’s all, you’ll now have a SVN Repo on your USB drive, which you can cary arround.