Exporting from Subversion with Phing

A minor triumph today. I managed to get phing to export some code from a Subversion repository without any of the pain usually involved in such tasks. I was trying to get phing to export to an already existing directory - for reasons I'll not go into here.

As a very basic test, I created an extremely simple build file first:

I then ran the file with the following command, getting this:

[raz@ballbreaker phing]# phing -f /opt/phing/build_files/test_exp.xml
Buildfile: /opt/phing/build_files/test_exp.xml

test_export > build:

[svnexport] Exporting SVN repository to '/opt/phing/test_exp'
Execution of target "build" failed for the following reason:
/opt/phing/build_files/test_exp.xml:4:31: Failed to run the 'svn export'
command: svn: '/opt/phing/test_exp' already exists (cmd: /usr/bin/svn export
 --non-interactive file:///srv/svn/repos/streamonline/trunk/css /opt/phing/test_exp)

BUILD FAILED
/opt/phing/build_files/test_exp.xml:4:31: Failed to run the 'svn export'
command: svn: '/opt/phing/test_exp' already exists (cmd: /usr/bin/svn export
--non-interactive file:///srv/svn/repos/streamonline/trunk/css /opt/phing/test_exp)
Total time: 0.2062 seconds

[raz@ballbreaker phing]#

This was a bit of a bugbear for a while until I realised that one has to force the operation to take place because the destination directory already existed - so I added the "force=true" attribute to the svnexport task in the build file... It is worth noting that this little feature was not documented in the Phing documentation.

Ran it again...

[raz@ballbreaker phing]# phing -f /opt/phing/build_files/test_exp.xml
Buildfile: /opt/phing/build_files/test_exp.xml

test_export > build:

[svnexport] Exporting SVN repository to '/opt/phing/test_exp'

BUILD FINISHED

Total time: 0.2125 seconds

[raz@ballbreaker phing]#

Splendid!