svnLogBrowser

This project has been retired, use at your own risk!

svnLogBrowser provides a web-based frontend for browsing through commit logs from any Subversion repository, and is released under the GNU GPL. It gives developers a tool for quickly locating changes, reviewing peer developer's commits, or just a general overview of what recent changes have been made to a project.

Features

• Quick, fulltext searches on changed paths or logs of all commits.
• Ability to syndicate only specific SVN paths, not just whole repositories.
• Identifies configured trunk, tag, or branch commits.
• Visitors can browse and search through individual developers' commits.
• Automatic links to path logs and file diffs. (only ViewVC is currently supported, more to follow soon)
• Automatic direct links to changed SVN files/paths. (only when using http[s]:// Subversion URLs)
• Customizable display names for developers.
• Commit counts for each developer.
• Optimized interface only shows active developers by default.
• Supports multiple changelogs in single installation.
• Stores current view settings in URL for linking to peers.
• Large commits can be hidden by default. (optimized with AJAX)
• Easy to use web installation and configuration script.

Live Demos

Subversion SVN Changelog - A changelog of all commits to the Subversion repository. The svnLogBrowser changelog is also hosted here.

wxWidgets SVN Changelog - This changelog shows off the power of these scripts on one of the largest open source SVN repositories (with about 50,000 revisions).

Requirements

• Webserver with PHP 4.3 or later
• MySQL 4.1 or later (untested on 4.0)
• Python 2.4 or later
• Python Modules: MySQLdb, pysvn

Quick Start

1. Setup a new MySQL database and user with access to that database.
2. Edit the slb-update.py script, and configure the database credentials.
3. Move the frontend folder to the location on your website you would like users to access the logs.
4. In your frontend folder, move config.php.dist to config.php, and edit config.php, adding in the database credentials. (this is done once for the update script, and once for the web frontend)
5. Point your browser at http://example.com/path/to/slb/setup.php to configure svnLogBrowser. See the "Configuration" section for details on settings.
6. Run slb-update.py to make the first update. Keep in mind that this can take a long time for large repositories, be patient.
   • $ python slb-update.py
7. Go back to the setup.php page, and add any developer's names you wish to display, then lock out access to the setup.php page. The page may require the password to edit anything, but it is not secure.
   • $ chmod 000 setup.php
8. Edit your crontab, and add the slb-update.py script to run however often you want it to update your changelogs.

Introduction

There are two individual parts of svnLogBrowser that need to work together to bring users the latest changes. The first is the frontend which consists of all the PHP scripts for browsing changes, and changing settings. The second is the Python slb-update.py script, which is built to run periodically from cron which reads the latest commits from the SVN repository, and adds them to the database for quick retrieval and searching.

The scripts are written in a way that it's possible to configure a secondary server to do the updates so the web frontend only requires MySQL and PHP, but it is more efficient to run the update script on the same server as MySQL.

Once the first update has been made, subsequent updates will only retrieve logs for new commits. So after you've made the first pass, updates will usually only take a few seconds. If you don't like the interval of time when commits have been made, but aren't shown in the frontend, you could even add the update script into the commit hooks for the SVN repository if you have the appropriate access. (instructions not given)

Configuration

This section outlines what each of the changelog settings are for.

Name: This is the displayed name for the changelog, simple enough.

Table Prefix: Each of your changelogs use individual tables in the database to ease the stress of searches and administration. The name of the tables used will be prefixed with this setting. These must be unique between changelogs.

SVN URL: This should be the URL to the SVN repository you want to watch logs from. You can use any of the standard URI that Subversion supports. Any of svn://, http://, and https:// will work. If you use a HTTP based URL, svnLogBrowser will automatically link to the files in the browser so users can take a look at the whole file in question.

Summary Limit: If any one commit contains more than the given number of changes here, then they will be hidden from the user by default with a link the user must click to see them. This is overridden if the user has turned off file summarizing. This functionality helps prevent PHP memory limit problems and also speeds up page load times significantly for some requests since the changes aren't actually generated, sent to the browser, and rendered until the user clicks the link. 10 changes is a good default setting for most.

Trunk, Tags, and Branches: (Optional) For svnLogBrowser to identify, mark, and shorten the display of changed paths, it needs to be told where each of these folders are located relative to the repository root. In traditional repositories, these will simply be /trunk, /tags, and /branches respectively. Please note the missing trailing slash, this is important.

Diff URL: (Optional) If you have ViewVC setup for your repository, you can add the URL to your top ViewVC page for the repository and svnLogBrowser will automatically link changes to their diffs and path logs in ViewVC. For Example, if your repository was MyProject, you would set this to something like this: http://www.myproject.com/viewvc/MyProject (no trailing slash)