How can I change the repository URL in Subversion?

Question

I know that my scenario is a little bit twisted. I have come across a repo owner asking to change the name of the repo URL. Basically they want to change it from h..p://svn/ABC/Repo_XYZ to h..p://svn/ABC/XYZ/.

First of all I am interested to know if this is really possible. I have admin rights on the server but I can't do anything from the user perspective. I was looking around on Google but everywhere I was encountering how the end user can fix it, not from the view of SVN server admin perspective. I'm also interested to know how this change can happen in URL. Along with URL change is there any other change that we need to make. I may not explained it very well. I would appreciate any edit that someone can do. Thanks

Answer 1

This should be possible by setting up softlinks on the server (or junction points if you're using a Windows server). In effect you have a repository in the Repo_XYZ subdirectory, so you should be able to softlink to XYZ. This method can definitely be used to change the path part of the URL (I've used it so that we can have http://server/svn/Source rather than http://server/path/to/repo/dirs/Source). One potential problem though could be that you are changing the name of the repository as well as the path, but I don't think that should be an issue.

Answer 2

It depends on SVN client. If you're using SmartSVN just click menu Modify->Relocate and enter new url

Answer 3

OK. If we say about Apache-served repos, let's see at my collection as example

I have "Hello" repo with path /svn/Hello/, because:

SVNParentPath "D:/Repositories/"

and

d:\Repositories>dir /AD /B
...
Hello

If I rename directory inside SVNParentPath, I effectively rename repo and change URL of it