Introduction

SvnAccel from Clearvision is designed to accelerate your productivity with Subversion. SvnAccel prevents long-running tasks from delaying the end of a commit action in Subversion by returning as soon as it can and allowing the slow operations to carry on in the background.

One typical use is when you want to send emails to a development team whenever a change has been committed in Subversion. This is normally a relatively slow process, and before SvnAccel, every developer would have to wait a few seconds longer for their commit to complete before getting on with their next piece of work. Now, with SvnAccel, you can accelerate Subversion by returning immediately and not waiting for the emails to be sent!

Prerequisites

SvnAccel is designed solely for use on Windows operating systems (Unix systems have this feature built in to the shells). This version of SvnAccel has been tested on

Windows XP Pro SP2 (x86 32bit)
Windows Server 2003 R2

It may work on other versions of Windows, but compatibility cannot be guaranteed. If you don't see your desired platform above, please contact us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

SvnAccel should work with any version of Subversion (and has been tested with 1.4.x)

Usage

SvnAccel is delivered as a single, date-stamped, executable file such as svnaccel_2009_03.exe. In this example, this file is licensed to be used until the end of March in 2009.

This can be installed and run from any location, so you might want to install it into:

C:\Program Files\Clearvision\SvnAccel\svnaccel.exe

or alternatively, copy the file directly into your Subversion hooks folder on the Subversion server.

To use the accelerator, simply prepend svnaccel.exe to the command that you want to accelerate in your post-commit hook script. Be careful to quote the whole command into one argument if necessary (by enclosing in quotes as in the examples below). As always in hook scripts, be careful to use full paths to executables.

Examples

A basic example

An example of a basic post-commit hook without SvnAccel:

C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe C:\svn\repos\hooks\make_me_go_faster.pl %1 %2

SvnAccel-erated:

"C:\Program Files\Clearvision\SvnAccel\svnaccel.exe" "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe C:\svn\repos\hooks\make_me_go_faster.pl %1 %2"

Using arguments with whitespace

An example of a complex post-commit hook without SvnAccel:

C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe C:\svn\repos\hooks\make_me_go_faster.pl %1 %2 "third arg has whitespace"

SvnAccel-erated:

"C:\Program Files\Clearvision\SvnAccel\svnaccel.exe" "C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe C:\svn\repos\hooks\make_me_go_faster.pl %1 %2 \"third arg has whitespace\""

Troubleshooting

If you have any problems:

try the un-accelerated command line first and check that it works as expected.
run the whole accelerated command directly in a DOS command window and check for any error return values and/or messages (on stderr).

If you still have problems, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it for further assistance.