Step 0

One-time operation

Note that you only need to go through the steps described in this section once; after you have a working copy of the website, you can update it from Subversion to collect changes to the site made by other people.

Step 1

My Computer

Spaces in pathnames can cause some of the software to break. The simplest way around this small problem for the present is to place the working copy at the top of the C:\ drive, so that is what we will do. To find the C:\ drive, open My Computer from the Windows start menu.

Step 2

The C:\ drive icon

Open the C:\ drive by clicking on it in the My Computer folder listing.

Step 3

The C:\ drive top folder

The illustration to the right shows the contents of the top-level C:\ drive folder, before doing a Subversion checkout. We will now do a checkout to create a working copy on this computer.

Step 3

Requesting a checkout

To request a checkout, click on the right mouse button inside the C:\ folder listing, and highlight the SVN Checkout item. Releasing or clicking on this item will start the checkout.

Step 3

Repository path

TurtleSVN will ask you where the Subversion repository is located. Enter the address of the repository in the top field,¹ and add the name of the new working copy folder after C:\ in the bottom field. To keep things simple, let’s use the repository name, gsl-en, in the bottom field (so it should read: C:\gsl-en).

Step 3

Confirm directory creation

If the folder you entered into the bottom box in the previous step does not yet exist (and it shouldn’t!), TurtleSVN will ask whether you want to create it. Click on Yes to confirm that you want to create the new folder.

Step 3

Checkout!

During checkout, TurtleSVN will show a scrolling list of the files being added to the working copy folder. The checkout process may take several minutes, if very large PDF, Word or graphics files are stored in the Subversion repository. When the checkout is finished, TurtleSVN will display the revision number of the checkout in the final line, as shown in the illustration to the right. You can then click on the OK button to close the checkout window.

Step 3

The working copy folder

Your new working copy will now be available in a special folder, marked with a green check-mark as shown in the illustration to the right. The green check-mark indicates that you have not made any changes to your working copy since the last time it was updated (i.e. since we did the checkout just now).

Step the last

All done!

You are now ready to begin editing in the working copy of the website. As you will see in the next chapters, the working copy folder is very similar to an ordinary folder; but it has a few extra features that we will use to keep the working copy up to date with the main Subversion repository.