How To View A Specific SVN Revision In Your Browser

Artem Russakovskii — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 06:04:17 +0000

This is a quick recipe that I found pretty interesting and relatively unknown.

Everyone who uses SVN knows that most repositories are set up to allow viewing of their contents via a web browser. For example, here's the trunk of WP Plugins SVN: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/ and here is the current trunk version of a specific file, let's say http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt.

The Problem

However, what if you wanted to view a specific revision of a file or directory in your browser?

Normally, on a command line, you'd do something like

svn co http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt stats
cd stats;
svn up -r100000 readme.txt

or simply

svn export -r100000 http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/stats/trunk/readme.txt

However, how would you do this in your browser? Trying something like ?r=100000 or ?revision=100000 parameters doesn't work.

Here is the syntax to get a specific revision of a file or directory:

Take the root of the repository (in our case, http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org)
Append this string !svn/bc/REVISION_NUMBER right after the repository root and before the directory or file path.

Going back to our example:

And that's how you do it, folks. Happy revisioning!

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