Source Code

You can install Subversion by compiling its source code release directly, or you can install one of the prepackaged binaries if there is one for your operating system. Unless a release has "alpha", "beta", or "rc" in its name, it is tested and considered stable for production use.

When upgrading, just install "on top of" the older release. Subversion 1.x is forward-compatible with any newer 1.y. No repository upgrade is required. As long as client and server both have the same major release number (1), olders clients will work with newer servers and newer clients will work with older servers. The only caveat is that if the client and server minor release numbers don't match (e.g., 1.0 and 1.1), then some of the features of the newer release may not be activated.

Source Release

To build Subversion from a source code release:

  1. Download the latest source code distribution or checkout the source code from version control.
  2. Build and install it according to the instructions in the INSTALL file in the top level of the distribution.

When your build is complete, you should find the 'svn' binary in the subversion/svn/ subdirectory (or installed in /usr/local/bin/, if you ran 'make install').

Checking Out Subversion

Subversion's source code is stored in the subversion tree of the main Subversion repository of the Apache Software Foundation. You can checkout the latest version of the code using the following command:

$ svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/trunk subversion

Web Access

If you would rather browse the source code than download it, you can do so via Apache's ViewVC instance.