I maintain several websites as Subversion Checkouts.  I’ve had great luck with this as long as everyone on my team follows a few rules, and I thought I’d start saving & sharing some of them here.  This brief article explains the use of a couple of key SVN commands.

One of the things I’ve gotten in the habit of lately is to check the version of each and every file that I’m about to update whenever I do a big server update like we did last night for a busy website.  In this case it was VERY helpful to have done-so because I accidentally released a new beta version of  a few files that our client hadn’t approved yet.  Since I have the ‘list’ of all files that I’ve changed it’s quite easy to revert a few if necessary.  It works very well.

svn status -u

    *   3362   new_feature/feature.msi

    *   3362   new_feature/feature.exe

svn up -r3362

I performed this update right inside the ‘not-ready-for-prime-time’ folder and it caused these files to update back to the revision closest to 3362.  BAM!  Done and Done.  Note that this update-to-revision is not sticky, so I’ll have to be careful if I update the server again before these particular files are approved.  Also, note that I’ve ignored another best-practice here which is that I should have had my developer put this beta area on a branch, which would have avoided this issue all-together; but that is a topic for another post.