How to checkout from SVN with an ANT task?

Question

I'm interested in any way that I can create an Ant task to checkout files from SubVersion. I "just" want to do the checkout from the command line. I've been using Eclipse with Ant and SubVersion for a while now, but my Ant and SubVersion knowledge is somewhat lacking as I relied on Eclipse to wire it all together.

I've been looking at SvnAnt as one solution, which is part of Subclipse from Tigris at http://subclipse.tigris.org/svnant/svn.html. It may work fine, but all I get are NoClassDefFoundErrors. To the more experienced this probably looks like a simple Ant configuration problem, but I don't know about that. I copied the svnant.jar and svnclientadapter.jar into my Ant lib directory. Then I tried to run the following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<project name="blah"> 

 <property environment="env"/>

 <path id="svnant.classpath">
  <pathelement location="${env.ANT_HOME}/lib"/>
  <fileset dir="${env.ANT_HOME}/lib/">
   <include name="svnant.jar"/>
  </fileset>
 </path>

 <typedef resource="org/tigris/subversion/svnant/svnantlib.xml" classpathref="svnant.classpath" /> 

 <target name="checkout">
  <svn username="abc" password="123">
   <checkout url="svn://blah/blah/trunk" destPath="workingcopy"/>
  </svn>
 </target>

</project>

To which I get the following response:

build.xml:17: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/tigris/subversion/javahl/SVNClientInterface

I am running SVN 1.7 and SvnAnt 1.3 on Windows XP 32-bit.

Thanks for any pointers!

Answer 1

From that error it seems you probably need JavaHL jar on your classpath as well (JavaHL is Java language bindings for the Subversion API). You a

This URL might help: http://subclipse.tigris.org/wiki/JavaHL

Otherwise you can use use Ant to run a native command (but that would make it OS-dependant of course).

Answer 2

If you are trying to get Ant to use the command line client, you may have to do the following:

<svn username="abc" password="123" javahl="false" svnkit="false"> 

Answer 3

Lets see if this helps for you, I copied svnjavahl.jar, svnClientAdapter.jar and svnant.jar into my $ANT_HOME/lib folder.

Then in xml file:

    <path id="svnant.classpath">
    <fileset dir="${ABSOLUTE-PATH-TO-ANT-HOME}/lib">
        <include name="**/*.jar"/>
    </fileset>
</path>

<typedef resource="org/tigris/subversion/svnant/svnantlib.xml" classpathref="svnant.classpath" /> 

And then, for checking out ..

    <svn dateFormatter="yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm">
    <checkout url="${MY-REPO-PATH}" 
              destpath="${checkout.dir}/MODULE-NAME" 
                      ....
</svn>

I think you are getting your error because you havent copied over svnjavahl.jar file into the lib folder. Do that and it should work.

Just noticed something, you are including ONE jar, not **/*.jar like I do, hence it cant find your svnjavahl.jar.

Answer 4

If you don't get SvnAnt working, you can always use exec:

<exec executable="/usr/local/bin/svn">
    <arg value="co" />
    <arg value="svn://repository/url" />
    <arg value="/destination/directory" />
</exec>