Subversion Windows Installation Quick Guide

Yes, this is a really short and quick guide.

1. Download the latest pre-built windows binary Subversion setup file. For example, the current latest svn-1.4.0-setup.exe
2. Install it.
3. Append Subversion’s bin directory (by default: C:\Program Files\Subversion\bin) into system environment variable “PATH”.
4. Create a new system environment variable “SVN_EDITOR” and set its value to be the path of your favorite text editor. For example,

   SVN_EDITOR=C:\\notepad2

   It should be a very lightweight editor, which is used to add the comments during some of the Subversion operation, like commit. My choice, as you can see, is Notepad2.

5. Create the Subversion repository, for example, “D:\Development\svnrepos”:

   > svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs "D:\\Development\\svnrepos"

6. Download the SVN service program from ChanLib: SVNService.zip
7. Extract the file SVNService.exe from SVNService.zip and put into
8. Install the SVNService (run the command from the Subversion’s bin directory) with the argument “-d” (run as daemon) and “-r ” followed by the repository path:

   > SVNService -install -d -r "D:\\Development\\svnrepos"

9. Optionally, install the TortoiseSVN to have a nice GUI to directly manipulate the Subversion source files in the Windows Explorer. Nothing special here. For TotalCommander (6.5 or later), to enable viewing the TortoiseSVN’s nice icon for those Subversion files, go to “Options”, “Display”, tick “Show overlay icons, e.g. for links”. It’s not really necessary to enable the normal windows context menu popup for right click. To see the context menu, just hold your right click a bit longer 🙂

Reference

• Mere-Moments Guide to installing a Subversion server on Windows
• TortoiseSVN Note for TotalCommander
• SVN Service Wrapper for Windows