How to display SVN revision on web site dynamically?

Question

My web site is a checkouted version of SVN repo. I mean .svn folders are placed on web server. I don't use web publishing.

And I want to display current project revision (whole web site) in footer. How can I do that?

If I were using web publishing, I could determine revision on build/publish and write it as static html.

So how to get revision dynamically? Read .svn files directly? Are there better ways?

I saw other such questions, but answer was using SubWCRev.exe, it isn't unfortunately acceptable.

Edit: Tarn gave interesting idea about SVN hooks on commit. Any other ideas?

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of is to use the svn CLI binaries and call them from the page. That way you can strip out the rest and grab the revision number. To be honest though, its a somewhat ugly solution.

Answer 2

You can write hooks for SVN. You could write a hook to update a file with the current build as part of your checkout process. Then you can read, cache and display that build number on your site.

Answer 3

use keyword substitution. enable substitution for the files you want to display revision information, and put a keyword, like $Revision: 144 $, there.

note that

$Rev$ expands to show the last revision in which the file changed, not the last revision to which it was updated

(see link above). if you want to show the global repository revision number, you better use svnversion.

also, see Related.

Answer 4

If want to display the latest revision number of your entire/repository or branch, keyword substitution will not help, I think a better solution would be to use a Build Management/Continuous Integration software, like CruiseControl.NET or TeamCity with a good build script.

Duplicate of:

• How do I sync the SVN revision number with my ASP.NET web site?
• ASP.NET Display SVN Revision Number

Answer 5

This previous question on SO has some discussion that might be useful to you: Always Commit the same file with SVN.

I've always done it by running a script that would use sed to replace a comment with the current timestamp in my $Rev$ file. That way, the file contents would change and Subversion would commit it. Somewhat manual, but you could write a script to first do that, and then do the actual svn commit command.