How to checkout from SVN with an ANT task?

Question

I'm interested in any way that I can create an Ant task to checkout files from SubVersion. I "just" want to do the checkout from the command line. I've been using Eclipse with Ant and SubVersion for a while now, but my Ant and SubVersion knowledge is somewhat lacking as I relied on Eclipse to wire it all together.

I've been looking at SvnAnt as one solution, which is part of Subclipse from Tigris at http://subclipse.tigris.org/svnant/svn.html. It may work fine, but all I get are NoClassDefFoundErrors. To the more experienced this probably looks like a simple Ant configuration problem, but I don't know about that. I copied the svnant.jar and svnclientadapter.jar into my Ant lib directory. Then I tried to run the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<project name="blah"> 

 <property environment="env"/>

 <path id="svnant.classpath">
  <pathelement location="${env.ANT_HOME}/lib"/>
  <fileset dir="${env.ANT_HOME}/lib/">
   <include name="svnant.jar"/>
  </fileset>
 </path>

 <typedef resource="org/tigris/subversion/svnant/svnantlib.xml" classpathref="svnant.classpath" /> 

 <target name="checkout">
  <svn username="abc" password="123">
   <checkout url="svn://blah/blah/trunk" destPath="workingcopy"/>
  </svn>
 </target>

</project>

To which I get the following response:

build.xml:17: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/tigris/subversion/javahl/SVNClientInterface

I am running SVN 1.7 and SvnAnt 1.3 on Windows XP 32-bit.

Thanks for any pointers!

Answer 1

If you don't get SvnAnt working, you can always use exec:

<exec executable="/usr/local/bin/svn">
    <arg value="co" />
    <arg value="svn://repository/url" />
    <arg value="/destination/directory" />
</exec>

Answer 2

From that error it seems you probably need JavaHL jar on your classpath as well (JavaHL is Java language bindings for the Subversion API). You a

This URL might help: http://subclipse.tigris.org/wiki/JavaHL

Otherwise you can use use Ant to run a native command (but that would make it OS-dependant of course).