Posted on Tuesday, 8th January 2008 by Lee

I was trying out a plugin in my Ruby on Rails application and decided not to use it. Apparently, when I installed the plugin, a reference to it was added to my subversion repository. Since the reference was not to a working directory, my capistrano deployments got debackled and died. Here is how you can remove external repositories from subversion.

If you get a message like this one when you are working with subversion:

Fetching external item into 'vendor/plugins/...'

Change directories so that you are in the root of your Rails application and issue the following command:

svn propedit svn:externals vendor/plugins

A list of the external plugins will appear in your default editor. Mine is vim. Delete the link that you no longer want, save the file and commit your changes.

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Posted in Ruby on Rails, Web Development | Comments (3)

3 Responses to “How To Remove External Repositories From Subversion”

  1. Tony Mann Says:
    June 14th, 2008 at 8:35 am

    Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks, this saved me some more hair pulling.

  2. Cameron Says:
    June 25th, 2008 at 12:28 pm

    Thanks guys, this helped a lot.

  3. Joe Grossberg Says:
    September 2nd, 2008 at 8:29 pm

    Awesome. I wish I’d searched for this sooner; was a real PITA to remove from SVN when I couldn’t check it out in the first place, and editing the .svn files by hand resulted in corruption. Thank you so much!

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