Question

I have been working some time on this and I can’t find the solution ( if there is any ).

So the question: Is there a way to do an svn update request via HTML web form?

I have tested multiple web-based SVN clients ( including building my own ), but they all lack the possibility to do an update.

I understand that this is an issue with the user permission that PHP uses, but even if I set all files on my system to 777 ( tried it on a virtual machine ), there still is no way I can archive it.

Anyone has some experience on this?

Thank you already.

I also went over all the directories and set owner to Everyone with full access. Now there can’t be a permission issue … I think.

Last edit:
It seems I can’t execute the SVN if the script file is not in the root directory of the svn directory. The final code now looks like this: http://codepad.org/Kb2K8e6m

Answer 1

The following function should more or less do it for you. It also prints out:

1. The exact command it is executing in shell
2. The output of the command (including errors) so that it can also be debugged.

---

function updatesvn() {

    if ( isset($_POST) ) {

        //Get svn username and password from request parameters

        $username = <your_svn_username>;
        $password = <your_svn_password>;

        //Get version number to move to
        $values = $_POST;
        $version = $values['revision'];

        //validate version number

        //Path where you have checked out your project
        $rpath = '/var/www/myproj';

        //Command to svn update
        $cmd = "cd $rpath; svn cleanup; svn --non-interactive --username $username --password $password update -r $version 2>&1";

        echo $cmd;
        $out = shell_exec($cmd);

        echo $out;
    }
}

EDIT: Beware of security loopholes in this code. I have simplified it here. We had used it in one of our applications where a user reaching this point was pre-authenticated as an Admin user of the web application. In addition this code was executed in an MVC framework where validations on input were done in central places before executing an action in a controller.