Using wget to “checkout” svn repository

Question

I have a very poorly laid out svn repository that I don't have permission to re-structure. There are several subprojects spread across the repo at various depths from the repository root. I want to be able to check out all of the trunks (but not any branch or tag folders) regardless of what depth they are at. I figure this would be a good problem for wget to solve. My initial use of wget looked something like this:

wget -r -X 'tags' -I "base/of/repo" "http://www.urlrepo.com/"

A few issues I ran into while running this command:

1. Wget still grabbed the tags folder even though I thought the -X flag should exclude them
2. The downloaded files are placed into folder "base/of/repo", which isn't terrible, but it would be nice to not save to this path

Thoughts?

Answer 1

You can do it recursively with bash and svn using sparse checkout.

Something like:

svn co --depth immediates svn://repo/trunk

Then on each subfolder, if it is 'tags':

svn up --set-depth empty tags

Else:

svn up --set-depth infinity dirName

Answer 2

Although it might work , it relies on something that's not 100% guaranteed: That you can use a browser when you use httpd as your Subversion repository server.

You can limit the checkout by using the --depth parameter on svn co and the --set-depth parameter when doing svn update . This will allow you to checkout only those folders and directories you want without pulling everything down. This is sometimes referred to as sparse checkouts . As a bonus, this is an actual checkout. You can do commits -- something wget won't let you do:

$ # I want to just checkout the immediate files under the URL:
$ svn co --set-depth=immediates $REPO/trunk/foo
A foo/first
A foo/second
A foo/third
# I want to checkout everything in first and third, but nothing in second:
$ cd foo
$ svn up --set-depth=none second #Removes directory second
$ svn up --set-depth=infinity first third

Using this should work with your original example:

$ svn co --depth=none http://www.urlrepo.com/ workdir
$ cd workdir
$ svn up --set-depth=none base
$ cd base
$ svn up --set-depth=none of
$ cd of
$ svn up --set-depth=infinity repo