Rename a Subversion Repository

The scenario: You have a folder called code-repo where you keep all your svn repositories (let’s assume it is located in the root c:/ on a Windoze system).  You have a repository named xproject.  For some reason you need to rename the repository.  Let’s say it needs to by yproject.  There are 3 steps to rename the repository and retain all the history you have in the repo.

  1. Create an svn dump file of the xproject repo: svnadmin dump C:\code-repo\xproject > c:\xproject.dmp
  2. Create the new yproject svn repo: svnadmin create C:\code-repo\yproject
  3. Load the dump of the old repository into the new one: svnadmin load C:\code-repo\yproject < C:\xproject.dmp

Sweet.

November 25th, 2008


4 Responses to “Rename a Subversion Repository”

  1. John Dondapati Says:
    June 15th, 2010 at 2:54 pm

    Thanks for the instructions. It helped.

  2. Mike Enriquez Says:
    July 19th, 2010 at 9:34 am

    Very helpful. Thank you!

  3. Dave Paden Says:
    September 20th, 2010 at 10:53 am

    Why not just rename the repository directory on the SVN server? I don’t think the actual folder name is in any way tied into database information…that would skip all the wasted time to dump and reload the database…there should be no reason to generate a new database.

  4. rl Says:
    December 10th, 2010 at 2:40 pm

    Not sure that would work as SVN can be either FSFS or BDB backend. With BDB that would be disastrous.

Leave a Comment