Command-line SVN client for Mac

Question

I purchased a new Mac running Mac OS X v10.8.5 (Mountain Lion). I've seen it written in various places that SVN is installed on OS X by default, but when I open a terminal and type which svn the program is not found. I've also run find / -name svn to check if it's installed somewhere that hasn't been added the the PATH variable.

So it seems like svn is not installed. Where can I get an OS X version of the official command-line SVN client?

Answer 1

If you have HomeBrew installed, try this command: brew install subversion

after that, brew link subversion

Hopefully, you will be good to go.

Answer 2

The default SVN version which is installed along with Xcode command line tools is 1.7.x. If you're fine with this version, than that should be enough. I want to select my SVN version and for that I'm using Homebrew.

Install Homebrew:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Install SVN:

brew install svn

To install a specific SVN version, check available versions:

brew versions svn

This command will list all available SVN versions.

Here's how you can install other than the default version (based on this gist)

# Update brew
brew update

# Switch to brew base directory
cd $( brew --prefix )

# Check old versions
brew versions svn

# Here's sample output
1.8.9    git checkout 9b75c92 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.8    git checkout c6cf8ac /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.5    git checkout fa4311c /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.4    git checkout ce669eb /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.3    git checkout 9b438ce /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.0    git checkout f56b641 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.1    git checkout 55577bb /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.10   git checkout 0060dc3 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.9    git checkout b0e6223 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.8    git checkout f7a42d2 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.7    git checkout a6dcc41 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.6    git checkout 6b8d25f /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.5    git checkout 5d5cd70 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.4    git checkout dc4245c /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.3    git checkout eb97154 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.2    git checkout d89bf83 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.6.17   git checkout 6e2d550 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.6.16   git checkout 83ed494 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb

# Install SVN version 1.6.17. You can just copy line from output
git checkout 6e2d550 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
brew install subversion

# Switch to SVN version 1.6
brew switch subversion 1.6.17

Now that the older SVN version is installed, we can re-install the latest formula in order to keep our repository clean:

git checkout -- Library/Formula/subversion.rb

Now you can switch between versions using svn switch command.

Make sure that brew's executables are first in your environment path. Check in your .bash_profile that path is set as follows:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:${PATH}