I purchased a new Mac running Mac OS X v10.8.5 (Mountain Lion). I’ve seen it written in various places that SVN is installed on OS X by default, but when I open a terminal and type which svn the program is not found. I’ve also run find / -name svn to check if it’s installed somewhere that hasn’t been added the the PATH variable. So it seems like svn is not installed. Where can I get an OS X version of the official command-line SVN client?
The default SVN version which is installed along with Xcode command line tools is 1.7.x. If you’re fine with this version, than that should be enough. I want to select my SVN version and for that I’m using Homebrew.
Install Homebrew:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Make sure that brew’s executables are first in your environment path. Check in your .bash_profile that path is set as follows:
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:${PATH}
source ~/.bash_profile
Install SVN:
brew install svn
To install a specific SVN version, check available versions:
brew versions svn
This command will list all available SVN versions. Here’s how you can install other than the default version (based on this gist)
# Update brew
brew update
# Switch to brew base directory
cd $( brew --prefix )
# Check old versions
brew versions svn
# Here's sample output
1.8.9 git checkout 9b75c92 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.8 git checkout c6cf8ac /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.5 git checkout fa4311c /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.4 git checkout ce669eb /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.3 git checkout 9b438ce /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.0 git checkout f56b641 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.8.1 git checkout 55577bb /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.10 git checkout 0060dc3 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.9 git checkout b0e6223 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.8 git checkout f7a42d2 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.7 git checkout a6dcc41 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.6 git checkout 6b8d25f /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.5 git checkout 5d5cd70 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.4 git checkout dc4245c /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.3 git checkout eb97154 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.7.2 git checkout d89bf83 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.6.17 git checkout 6e2d550 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
1.6.16 git checkout 83ed494 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
# Install SVN version 1.6.17. You can just copy line from output
git checkout 6e2d550 /usr/local/Library/Formula/subversion.rb
brew install subversion
# Switch to SVN version 1.6
brew switch subversion 1.6.17
Now that the older SVN version is installed, we can re-install the latest formula in order to keep our repository clean:
git checkout -- Library/Formula/subversion.rb
Now you can switch between versions using svn switch command.
