At some point in a developers life, we have to upgrade, switch hosting providers or replace broken hardware and with that comes the inevitable. Moving all of our apps, data and configuration settings, and eventually our holy repository.

Moving an SVN repository from one Subversion server to another, while carrying over the entire version history information may seem like a daunting task, but fortunately it’s rather quite easy and straight forward.

Backup your old Repository

Step one is the generate a dump file of the existing repository which we can later move to our new server.
We create this dump with the following command:

# svnadmin dump /path/to/old/repository > repository.svn_dump

This dump file contains now all the revisions that have ever been made and committed to our SVN repository, and therefore this file may get rather large, depending on how active and old the repository is.

Create the new Repository and move the dump file

Now let’s create a new repository on our new server:

# svnadmin create /path/to/new/repository

then we simply transfer the dump file to our new subversion server.

Import the dump file

And finally import our dump file with the force-uuid flag:

# svnadmin load –force-uuid /path/to/new/repository < repository.svn_dump

The force-uuid flag retains the UUID and keeps the repo’s integrity in check.

Note

You also have the option to  import a partial dump, by creating an incremental dump starting at a revision number of your choice, like such:

# svnadmin dump –incremental -r 456789 /path/to/old/repository > repository_r456789.svn_dump

and then import it on your target server:

# svnadmin load /path/to/new/repository < repository_r456789.svn_dump

SVN dumps should also be part of your repository backup strategy, and conveniently they work across different versions of subversion.

With the release of Eclipse Ganymede, the IDE has become even better. I remember using Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0.1 for about two weeks, after giving up and moving over to Netbeans 6.5. Too many issues with the debugging part, constant exceptions and a sizable slow down when working on web pages just got me too frustrated.

Now Ganymede is out for a while, but I just haven’t given it a change until now. And I’m positively surprised. While still fairly slow and lagging wile editing html/css content, gone are the countless exceptions, the cumbersome, seemingly endless installation procedure and also xDebug integrates quite nicely with the IDE. There are still a few caveats during the install, especially on a 64 bit environment.

So here are the installation steps I went through getting this IDE installed, PHP editing enabled and everything configured.

Getting the correct version of Java JRE setup. Eclipse doesn’t come with one, so we have to get the right version. I have read multiple blogs from frustrated users complaining that their IDE won’t start up or just start half way. That would be an indication of the wrong JRE. We need the matching JRE for your OS. I got it from here:    32 bit JRE and 64 bit JRE

1. Download Install the Java Runtime Environment. I will install the 64bit version it into /opt, for 32bit version you will need to substitute the file name.

2. Setting the JRE 6u13 as the default:

(you should be getting an output like this: Using ‘/opt/java/jre1.6.0_13/bin/java’ to provide ‘java’)

3. Download and install Eclipse. I will install the full version 3.4 64bit and PDT into /opt/eclipse. You’ll find other versions (32bit) here:

4. Running Eclipse and install PDT 2.0

This will start our IDE.

5. Now we’re going to add PDT 2.0 integration.

Click OK to close the Available Sites Manager. The rest is just as easy – two new sites should appear in the Available Software sites list. Expand the DLTK site (the small triangle to the left of the site name), then the Dynamic Languages Toolkit option, and check “Dynamic Languages Toolkit – Core Frameworks (Incubation)”, from the top of the list. Then repeat the process with the PDT Update site – expand PDT Update Site -> PDT SDK 2.0.0 and check “PDT Runtime Feature” from the list. If you like to add the latest Subversion client, select the entire “update_1.6.x” feature. That’s it. Click Install and follow the prompts.

Once installed, Eclipse recommends restarting the application. Accept, restart, and enjoy your new PHP IDE with PDT 2.