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I just read Andrej Koelewijn’s post on the IT-eye blog, Version control for the solo programmer, about installing Mercurial, a Distributed Version Control System. The most important reason for this exercise was to create a local, single user repository.

DVCS’s are ubercool and you can do some nice tricks with them. Nonetheless, not everybody needs these tricks (yet?) and integration with popular IDE’s isn’t nearly as good as with CVS or Subversion.

Most people who develop software regularly have a copy of TortoiseSVN installed and it’s perfectly possible to create a local, single user repository with just TortoiseSVN.

Here’s how:

1. Create an empty directory.
2. Right click it, choose TortoiseSVN - Create repository here.
3. Choose “Native filesystem (FSFS)”. You could use Berkeley DB as well, but FSFS is the default nowadays.
4. TortoiseSVN should report that it successfully created the repository.
5. Create another empty directory.
6. Right click it, choose TortoiseSVN - Checkout.
7. Pick the repository you just created, click OK and there you go!

You now have a version controlled directory that you can use as… any other version controlled directory with TortoiseSVN. It really doesn’t matter whether the repository lives on a remote webserver or on your local hard drive.

Technorati: version control, subversion, tortoisesvn

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