CVS Checkout on OS X

I normally use Eclipse and its built-in CVS support to checkout different development projects. As with most tools you’re abstracted away from the underlying commands. I recently stumbled across a cool Ruby on Rails project called RealTime on Rails. I’ll post more on this project at a later date, but the general objective is to enable push capabilities to AJAX applications. This means the server can actually push data to different web clients instead of using a traditional polling method.

At any rate, the RTRails project can only be accessed through CVS. I wanted to check out the project on my Mac using the cvs command and found it very simple to work with. Of course, most things are simple once you learn how to do them. Here’s the command in action:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@rubyforge.org:/var/cvs/rtrails checkout rtrails

The -d parameter specifies the root directory of the repository. While rtrails specifies which project we want to checkout. It’s amazing how simple things are if you just take the time to learn them.

Obviously the argument can be made that this is slower than using a GUI tool to manage CVS projects. A valid argument, but most of the time I’m much more efficient at the command line than with a tool. Plus it’s cool to know what’s going on under the hood.