My workplace is switching from CVS to Subversion for source-code version control so I need to pick up Subversion rather quickly. It took me awhile to get comfortable developing with CVS and now I need to learn stuff all over again. I even have scripts setup to help with the deployment of my project using CVS -- now they need to be modified to work with Subversion. Oh well, I'm sure its for the best.
I've been reading the awesome, and free, Subversion book a lot lately and it has really helped with my understanding of how Subversion works. Since Subversion is not installed on OS X by default, we need to install it before using it from the command line. I downloaded the easy-to-install Subversion .dmg distributed by Martin Ott.
After running the .pkg-installer I was able to run svn help from the command line to confirm it was installed properly. If that command doesn't work after installing, you may need to add this line to the .profile file (in your home directory):
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin
Now you should be able to run all the SVN commands from your Mac OS X command line. If you prefer a GUI interface to SVN, check out svnX. I do all my development from within Eclipse, so I'm using an SVN plugin for Eclipse called Subversive. I prefer it over the more commonly known Subeclipse plugin because Subversive has a friendlier, and seemingly more configurable, interface.
Checking out a project from the command line over SSH is really simple, however while searching Google I was unable to find this "simple" answer. If I had found the free Subversion book before searching for this answer, I probably wouldn't be writing this:
svn checkout svn+ssh://svn.dev82.org/projects/myproject
That's it! The syntax for checking out a project is very similar to CVS, however SVN has the concept of "URLs" to specify the location and type of connection to your repository. If you have SSH Client Keys setup, you can run SVN commands over SSH without the password prompt (which is necessary for the deployment scripts I use).