Installing a Subversion Client on OS X

I’ve been evaluating a few on-line collaboration tools built on Rails.  The most recent one I’ve looked into is ProjectLounge Lite.  It’s completely open source so I decided to give it a run on OS X.  Since I was unable to download a zip file I decided to checkout the project using Subversion.  Unfortunately I didn’t have Subversion installed on my Mac so I had to dig around for it.  I didn’t want to deal with compiling from source and was able to find this binary installer from Martin Ott.

After downloading, I simply executed the .pkg file and the necessary files were installed to /usr/local/bin.  I then created a symbolic link so that Subversion would exist in my path:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/svn /usr/bin/svn

This enabled me to checkout the Rails project using the following command:

svn checkout svn://svn.projectlounge.com/open/light

I was able to successfully grab the latest version of code and run it on my local dev box.  This whole process took about 10 minutes and would have taken much longer if I had to compile from source.  Sometimes I like to get under the hood, but as I grow older (and lazier) I like for things to be simple and “just work”.

I can’t neglect the fact that none of this would have been possible without the open source community.  I’m certain that Martin as well as the Project Lounge team have put a tremendous amount of effort into their projects.  Kudos to all for making my life easier!

2 Responses to “Installing a Subversion Client on OS X”

1. Ian Connor says:

   June 20, 2006 at 4:33 am

   Thanks for the kind words and I am glad you like the project.
2. dennis says:

   June 20, 2006 at 7:50 pm

   No problem Ian. Thanks for the message and keep up the good work!