svn:externals and moving servers

Having just gone through the pain of moving our subversion repository off a machine that died on us, we discovered, or rather re-discovered the pain of (ab)using svn:externals to refer internally to the repository. i.e. we had a series of 'svn:externals' properties pointing to the server that went down.

To fix this I wrote the following ruby script to iterate over a checked-out repository and replace any existing svn:externals references to the current server with a new address. This post is really meant just to hold the ruby code I wrote so I can find it in the future ! :)

directory="";
Dir.foreach( directory ) do |x|
        unless x== "." or x == ".." or x ==".svn"
            if  File.directory?( directory + "/" + x )
                # Do the externals check here.
                externals= `svn propget svn:externals "#{directory}/#{x}"`.split("\n");
                if externals.length > 0
                    puts "--------------  #{directory}/#{x} -------- "
               
                    # Swap the bala for svn.
                    externals.collect! do |line|
                        line.gsub!( /oldServer:81/, 'newServer:81' );
                    end
               
                    # Write the new svn:externals property out to a file to use with the propset...
                    File.open("externals.txt","w") do |file|
                        file.puts( externals.join("\n") );
                    end
               
                    # Apply the new svn:externals property.
                    `svn propset svn:externals "#{directory}/#{x}" --file externals.txt`
                end
                manipulateDirectory( directory+"/"+x );
            else
            end
        end
end

end

manipulateDirectory( "." ) ;