Manage your sites with svn externals

After having worked with subversion for a while I finally got time to restructure my repository layouts. What I want is a simple way to update all the sites I maintain and I want those sites under version control.

Steps I took

  1. Make a drupal core repository
  2. Create your project repository
  3. Reference to the drupal core

Directory layout

In order to get a nice update-able project directory tree we choose a layout listed below.
www/
This contains only drupal core code will live.

Managing your svn repository with external ones

So you finally have your own svn repository. But you need to use external code as well. And you want to keep track of changes in those external code. Then use svn:externals. This tells subversion there are external subversion repositories destined to blend into the current folder. I learned this from a script thanks to Wim Leers

First let's create an externals to a repository in the current directory.

svn propedit svn:externals .
If this fails configure an editor like this
export EDITOR=vi