Question

Googling this does little good, as you can imagine.

Does anyone have resources that outline how the PHP Subversion support works. I need to open a repository on disk, and read new commit logs, etc.

Anything you have, would be helpful. Except the PHP docs. I have those already 🙂

Answer 1

When I need to access a SVN repository from PHP, I often end up using the “svn” command, calling it with exec or passthru — it’s working pretty well ; only requires that there is an svn client installed on the machine, which is always the case for my computers.

A nice thing to note is that the svn command supports an –xml option, at least for some commands — and XML is easy to parse with PHP, using, for instance, simplexml_load_string.

Well, at least, it’s far easier than parsing the output of the svn command ^^

Another solution would be to use the VersionControl_SVN library ; it, itself, acts as a wrapper arround the svn command, and might help you by already doing a part of the work for you.

Finally, if you can install PHP extensions on your server, there is a PECL SVN extension — here is its manual.

I’ve never used it, and it’s marked as “beta”, so your host might not like it… Still, I’ve heard that it works OK a couple of times.

Of course, in either case, knowing a bit about SVN, how it works, how the svn command works, and what kind of informations/output it can get, is quite helpful.

Hope this helps ; if you have more specific questions, don’t hesitate 🙂