How to properly create an SVN tag from trunk?

Question

I am creating my first project in Subversion. So far I have

 branches
 tags
 trunk

I think I immediately need to make branches singular and start over. Update branches is the norm.

I have been doing work in trunk and moving the contents to tags as follows.

mkdir tags/1.0
cp -rf trunk/* tags/1.0
svn add tags/1.0
svn commit -m " create a first tagged version"

My gut tells me this is totally wrong, and I should maintain some relationship between the files using svn copy. The files I create in this way will have no relationship to each other, and I am sure I will miss out on Subversion features. Am I correct?

Should I use svn copy for the individual files?

mkdir tags/1.0
svn add tags/1.0
svn copy trunk/file1 tags/1.0
svn copy trunk/file2 tags/1.0
svn copy trunk/file3 tags/1.0
svn commit -m " create a first tagged version"

Should I use svn copy on the entire directory?

svn copy cp -rf trunk tags/1.0
svn commit -m " create a first tagged version"

Answer 1

You are correct in that it's not "right" to add files to the tags folder.

You've correctly guessed that copy is the operation to use; it lets Subversion keep track of the history of these files, and also (I assume) store them much more efficiently.

In my experience, it's best to do copies ("snapshots") of entire projects, i.e. all files from the root check-out location. That way the snapshot can stand on its own, as a true representation of the entire project's state at a particular point in time.

This part of "the book" shows how the command is typically used.

Answer 2

Use:

svn copy http://svn.example.com/project/trunk \
      http://svn.example.com/project/tags/1.0 -m "Release 1.0"

Shorthand:

cd /path/to/project
svn copy ^/trunk ^/tags/1.0 -m "Release 1.0"

Answer 3

As noted by @victor hugo, the "proper" way is to use svn copy. There is one caveat though. The "tag" created that way will not be a true tag, it will be an exact copy of the specified revision, but it will be a different revision itself. So if your build system makes use of svn revision somehow (e.g. incorporates the number obtained with 'svn info' into the version of the product you build), then you won't be able to build exactly the same product from a tag (the result will have the revision of the tag instead of that of the original code).

It looks like by design there is no way in svn to create a truly proper meta tag.

Answer 4

Could use Tortoise:

http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-branchtag.html

Answer 5

Just use this:

svn  copy  http://svn.example.com/project/trunk  
           http://svn.example.com/project/branches/release-1
           -m  "branch for release 1.0"

(all on one line, of course.) You should always make a branch of the entire trunk folder and contents. It is of course possible to branch sub-parts of the trunk, but this will almost never be a good practice. You want the branch to behave exactly like the trunk does now, and for that to happen you have to branch the entire trunk.

See a better summary of SVN usage at my blog: SVN Essentials, and SVN Essentials 2

Answer 6

@victor hugo and @unwind are correct, and victor's solution is by far the simplest. However BEWARE of externals in your SVN project. If you reference external libraries, the external's revision reference (whether a tag, or HEAD, or number) will remain unchanged when you tag directories that have external references.

It is possible to create a script to handle this aspect of tagging, for a discussion on that topic, see this SO article: Tagging an SVN checkout with externals

Answer 7

Another option to tag a Subversion repository is to add the tag to the svn:log property like this:

   echo "TAG: your_tag_text" > newlog
   svn propget $REPO --revprop -r $tagged_revision >> newlog
   svn propset $REPO --revprop -r $tagged_revision -F newlog
   rm newlog

I recently started thinking that this is the most "right" way to tag. This way you don't create extra revisions (as you do with "svn cp") and still can easily extract all tags by using grep on "svn log" output:

   svn log | awk '/----/ {
                      expect_rev=1;
                      expect_tag=0;
                  }
                  /^r[[:digit:]]+/ {
                      if(expect_rev) {
                          rev=$1;
                          expect_tag=1;
                          expect_rev=0;
                      }
                  }
                  /^TAG:/ {
                      if(expect_tag) {
                          print "Revision "rev", Tag: "$2;
                      }
                      expect_tag=0;
                  }'

Also, this way you may seamlessly delete tags if you need to. So the tags become a complete meta-information, and I like it.

Answer 8

svn copy http://URL/svn/trukSource http://URL/svn/tagDestination -m "Test tag code" 
  $error[0].Exception | Select-object Data

All you have to do change URL path. This command will create new dir "tagDestination". The second line will be let know you the full error details if any occur. Create svn env variable if not created. Can check (Cmd:- set, Powershell:- Get-ChildItem Env:) Default path is "C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin\TortoiseProc.exe"

Answer 9

Try this. It works for me:

mkdir <repos>/tags/Release1.0
svn commit <repos>/tags/Release1.0 
svn copy <repos>/trunk/* <repos>/tag/Release1.0
svn commit <repos/tags/Release1.0 -m "Tagging Release1.0"