PECL Extension Review: SVN Is A Great Product

By Brandon Savage on October 4, 2008

Out Of Date Warning

Languages change. Perspectives are different. Ideas move on. This article was published on October 4, 2008 which is more than two years ago. It may be out of date. You should verify that technical information in this article is still current before relying upon it for your own purposes.

Even though the SVN extension for PHP is still in beta, the team has done a fantastic job with this PECL package. They’ve captured the most common SVN functions, put them into the package, and provided an easy way to view, manage, and control a Subversion repository right from PHP.

That’s not to say that the package is perfect: far from it, in fact. The documentation is the most disappointing facet, something I may help resolve through contributing to the manual. Also, most programs don’t yet recognize the SVN functions as part of PHP, so syntax highlighting is not available. This is a small inconvenience, however, and certainly no reason to NOT use it.

The package documentation can be found here and it’s worth a look for anyone thinking about doing anything SVN-related with PHP. This beats using exec() to execute SVN commands, as it ensures that the commands are executed properly.

I see the most immediate use of this tool in building a Trac-like PHP application. I’m sure someone has thought of it, but with Trac being popular, supported, and already finished, no one has yet dealt with this issue. Still, I’d like to see someone build that at some point.