What subversion clients for Windows are there that do not need installation?

Question

A colleague of mine agreed to using SVN for our little project, but only if he doesn't have to install it. He has a U3 USB stick where he keeps the project files and he would like the SVN client to live there as well. I tried searching for a non-installable SVN client, but couldn't find anything (although I suspect that many of the available clients would run if just copy-pasted from an installation folder). Can anyone recommend me some? I'd really like to get version control going. Would be best if it had a GUI for merging files too, not just command line.

Added: The copy-paste from an existing installation is one solution, but I'd like to see first if there perhaps isn't some client that does not require installation by design. If not, I guess RapidSVN is nice enough (although it does leave stuff in Windows registry).

Answer 1

There is a portable version of RapidSVN here. Just install it to a flash drive.

Answer 2

Try RapidSVN. The CollabNet binaries can be used in a similar fashion for command-line support. Yes, these have installers, but you can simply copy the binaries around -- I use Universal Extractor to get the binaries out without having to run the installer.

Also, an enterprising user has packaged RapidSVN as a PortableApp. There is an "installer", but it really just unzips things into a directory of your choice and writes a default configuration file into that directory.

Answer 3

You should look at Subversion on a Stick.

Answer 4

I'd go with the copy and paste the bin folder from SlikSVN.

EDIT:

Seems like SlikSVN is the underlying platform behind several graphical SVN clients. In my experience it seems stable and reliable.

Specifically, the bottom link on this page seems to be a non-install/xcopy precompiled package (although I haven't tried this one myself, only inspected it). It does not appear to be the newest, though. You might do your friend a favour by installing the newest SlikSVN on your own computer, and then share the bin files with your co-dev.

Answer 5

Alternative Two should be pretty sufficient. But both methods requires installing it to the USB device which I guess is similar to just copying onto it. I checked Wikipedia and there are some standalone listed there.

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EDIT: SmartSVN, QSvn (portable version requires install), SyncrhoSVN (they have version which requires you to extract and run), etc. But is copy + run any different than installing to the USB?

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Alternative One Load Cygwin on the USB device, install SVN support and run it off of that. No GUI as far as I know nor have I tried to set one up (which I assume is more than possible) since I've had the luxury of using TortoiseSVN (requires install).

Alternative Two Install TortoiseSVN on a USB device and use if off of that. Has GUI interface for merging and diff. This may be relevant to your interest. However, Google has some results indicting they are slow.

Answer 6

I was able to use the command line client that I had installed onto a usb stick. I then whipped up a couple batch files that did the basic checkout, checkin stuff, and one batch file that gave me a command prompt with a PATH set.

It doesn't have all the integration of something like tortoise, but I don't think you would be able to easily do that from a usb stick.

Answer 7

There's a portable version of SmartSVN which is what I use. It's a pretty good SVN client. Needs JRE though. Has a nice GUI and all.

Answer 8

If Java is available on the machines you could use SVNKit.

Answer 9

i've had this same problem, and thought it would be easier to find than it is..

Bert Huijben posted the solution as a reply to Cecil, but his link was outdated.

http://subversion.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList?folderID=8100

scroll to bottom, you can grab a zip of the binaries. works for me

Answer 10

try this http://alagazam.net/

or you can compile it yourself ! Cheers ~