Though many teams are using Subversion (SVN) to work together and share code, version control software provides a huge number of features that are not often used.  Just about any developer these days knows how to checkout a project and commit or revert changes.  But a lot of teams don’t really use or need anything beyond that.

The great thing about version control systems like SVN is that you gain a bunch of really useful functionality - even if you have only been using it for sharing code.  One of those features is the ability to create an export of all modified files since the previous release.  A common scenario for this is when you are working on a web application and it’s time to deploy all the recent changes to the production server.  You might think that you need to delve into tagging and branching to do this, but that is not necessary.

Lets say that you last deployed your application from repository version #500.  After a few weeks of development, the repository is now up to revision #575.  The team has decided that the code is stable and you are ready to package up all new/changed files to transfer to the host server, client, etc.

1. Using TortoiseSVN, right-click on your working folder and select “Show Log” from the TortoiseSVN menu.
2. Click the revision that was last published (#500 in this example)
3. Ctrl+Click the HEAD revision (or whatever revision you want to release ie #575) so that both the old and the new revisions are highlighted.
4. Right-click on either of the highlighted revisions and select “Compare revisions.”  This will open a dialog window that lists all new/modified files.
5. Select all files from this list (Ctrl+a) then right-click on the highlighted files and select “Export selection to…”

You’ll be prompted for a location to save your updated files and SVN will export them all with the directory structure preserved.  You can then zip this up for your client, transfer it to your host or whatever you normally do to deploy the application.

Some teams prefer to actually do an update right on the production server and simply checkout the files that way.  If your hosting setup permits and you don’t mind the “.svn” files in on your server, that is another easy option for deploying code.

For even more automation, this could all be done using batch, shell or ant build scripts.  If you have such a script, please feel free to post it in the comments.

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