Include Elastica in your project as svn:externals

As most of you know, Elastica is hosted on github, which means it uses git as its revision control system. I have several projects which include Elastica but use subversion as its version control system. Until now, I included Elastica as an external svn source by hosting my own Elastica svn repository. But yesterday I discovered that the code from github can also be checked out through svn. I immediately asked google to get more details about this feature and discovered several blog entries on the github blog which I had somehow missed.

It is not only possible to check out repositories, but also to check out some specific subfolders or tags and you can even commit to the repository (which I didn't test). As in my projects I only use the Elastica library folder and don't need all the tests and additional data, I check out only the lib folder. If you want to check out the Elastica lib folder from version v0.18.6.0, use the following line of code:

svn co https://github.com/ruflin/Elastica/tags/v0.18.6.0/lib/ .

If you have a lib folder in your project with all your frameworks and libraries and you want to add Elastica as an external source (which is quite useful), you can set the svn:externals property on your library folder to the following.

https://github.com/ruflin/Elastica/tags/v0.18.6.0/lib/Elastica Elastica

If you already have other sources added as externals to your repository (for example ZF), just add this line below your existing lines. The next time you will update your repository, the Elastica folder with all its files will be checked out. To update to one of the next versions of Elastica, update the version number in the url in your svn:externals properties.