How do you access physical VisualSVN server files?

Question

I'm wondering how you access the physical files that have been committed to a svn repository? I set my svn repository to D:\repositories at installation and for some reason, I can't find or see any of the files. Is there something that I'm missing?

Solution

An SVN repository is not stored in a standard file structure. You should see subdirectories, and inside them are more subdirectories, and inside those are checksum files, binary files, etc.

For more information, you should refer to the Subversion Book - it has a wealth of official information.

If you're looking to get a working copy of the subversion repository for say, running your actual website, then the easiest and safest way to do this is to do an svn checkout to a folder on your web server, and point your web server to read the website from that folder. Each time you want to update the website, do an svn update. The same principal applies for doing a daily build server (although for a build server you'll want to delete your local working copy first), and many other scenarios.

There are Subversion plugins that will allow you to view the head revision as a physical file structure, but I'm uneasy to recommend them, because a single accidental commit will bring down your entire scenario.