I bet many of you are working on your own software projects and would love to have a version control at their disposal. This is useful for many reasons. If you are working with one or more friends on a joint project, if you have a desktop and a laptop and you want to work from both computers while keeping the files synchronized, or if you just want to be more organized and keep versions and backups of your work. You can also use Visual SVN to sync folders or documents between several computers.

This article will have 2 sections One will discuss the SVN Server installation and configuration and the second part will be about how to use the SVN client.

First you have to download the Visual SVN Server Installation

Installing the Visual SVN Server

Double click on the Visual SVN executable to begin the installation. After a few next next next clicks you will get this screen.

Here you can select the Location of the installation and the Location of the repositories (where the projects will be located). If you are using this installation on a server and intend to access it from different locations you will have to specify a Server Port for the SVN server to use which you will later forward on the router.

You also have the option to select the authentication methods either Windows users or specific Subversions users. We will leave everything as is and finish the installation.

Creating a Repository

Right Click on Repositories and select Create New Repository

You will be prompted to provide a name to that repository and you will have the options to create a "default structure" which means you will get the trunk, branches and tags folders. for those of you who are familiar with source control trunk is the "Development" main branch, branches are for temporary copies of the main branch and tags are versions of the main development you want to keep for visioning. You can read more about it here.

After you have specified the repository name click ok and you are all done creating your first repository.

Configuring Users

Go to the start menu and run the Visual SVN Server Manage.

Right Click on Users and select Create User

You will have to specify a username and passwords click OK and you have your first User, Weepe!

Remember the repository we created a few minutes ago, now is the time to assign premitions to our newly created user. Right click on the repository and select properties:

You will get the following screen:

Click on add and you will see the list of all the users in the system

Select the user you want to add permissions and click OK. You can now see that the user Amit is in the group of users that are allowed to access the SVN server

That’s it. You now have your own SVN server at your disposal. In the next couple of days I will show you how to work with the Visual SVN Server using it’s client, so don’t forget to Grab our feed and stay updated.

If you have any questions please comment.

Amit