Getting SVN revision number into a program automatically

Question

I have a python project under SVN, and I'm wanting to display the version number when it is run. Is there any way of doing this (such as automatically running a short script on commit which could update a version file, or querying an SVN repository in Python?)

Answer 1

I'm not sure about the Python specifics, but if put the string $Revision$ into your file somewhere and you have enable-auto-props=true in your SVN config, it'll get rewritten to something like $Revision: 144$. You could then parse this in your script.

There are a number of property keywords you can use in this way.

This won't have any overhead, e.g. querying the SVN repo, because the string is hard-coded into your file on commit or update.

I'm not sure how you'd parse this in Python but in PHP I'd do:

$revString = '$Revision: 144$';
if(preg_match('/: ([0-9]+)\$/', $revString, $matches) {
    echo 'Revision is ' . $matches[1];
}