Searching subversion history (full text)

Question

Is there a way to perform a full text search of a subversion repository, including all the history?

For example, I've written a feature that I used somewhere, but then it wasn't needed, so I svn rm'd the files, but now I need to find it again to use it for something else. The svn log probably says something like "removed unused stuff", and there's loads of checkins like that.

Answer 1

I don't have any experience with it, but SupoSE (open source, written in Java) is a tool designed to do exactly this.

Answer 2

I have been looking for something similar. The best I have come up with is OpenGrok. I have not tried to implement it yet, but sounds promising.

Answer 3

The best way that I've found to do this is with less:

svn log --verbose | less

Once less comes up with output, you can hit / to search, like VIM.

Edit:

According to the author, he wants to search more than just the messages and the file names. In which case you will be required to ghetto-hack it together with something like:

svn diff -r0:HEAD | less

You can also substitute grep or something else to do the searching for you. If you want to use this on a sub-directory of the repository, you will need to use svn log to discern the first revision in which that directory existed, and use that revision instead of 0.

Answer 4

I usually do what Jack M says (use svn log --verbose) but I pipe to grep instead of less.

Answer 5

I was looking for the same thing and found this:

http://svn-search.sourceforge.net/

Answer 6

If you are running Windows have a look at SvnQuery. It maintains a full text index of local or remote repositories. Every document ever committed to a repository gets indexed. You can do google-like queries from a simple web interface.

Answer 7

I'm using a small shellscript, but this only works for a single file. You can ofcourse combine this with find to include more files.

#!/bin/bash
for REV in `svn log $1 | grep ^r[0-9] | awk '{print $1}'`; do 
  svn cat $1 -r $REV | grep -q $2
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then 
    echo "$REV"
  fi 
done

If you really want to search everything, use the svnadmin dump command and grep through that.

Answer 8

While not free, you might take a look at Fisheye from Atlassian, the same folks that bring you JIRA. It does full text search against SVN with many other useful features.

http://www.atlassian.com/software/fisheye/

Answer 9

I just ran into this problem and

svnadmin dump <repo location> |grep -i <search term>

did the job for me. Returned the revision of the first occurrence and quoted the line I was looking for.

Answer 10

git svn clone

git grep < some regex >