Xcode 5, Coda 2, and SVN

When the office updated to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion last year, we discovered our Coda 2 applications could not longer access our Subversion repositories. We were able to resolve this issue by installing Xcode from the App Store and then installing Xcode's command line tools.

With the recent release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks came a slew of related app updates through the App Store. Though it had been released a while earlier, one of the apps downloaded to my system was Xcode 5. Unfortunately, the next time I opened a Coda 2 project, this is the error message that appeared:

Coda 2 SVN upgrade error message

Xcode 5 comes with an updated version of Subversion that is not compatible with our Coda 2 SVN repositories. This caused us a couple headaches, but we were able to find some easy solutions.

Option 1

We checked and confirmed that our SVN servers would have no problem with the updated Subversion 1.7.x that Xcode 5 was using now. Therefore, we could go through each of our Coda 2 projects and simply update our working copies with SVN's built-in upgrade command. To do so, you need only:

  1. Open "Terminal" on your OS X system
  2. Change directories to one of your Coda 2 projects on your system. On my system, I kept them in a folder named "Sites".
  3. In that directory, run the "svn upgrade" command.

The command will automatically update the project to your current version of SVN. Now you would be able to open and sync that Coda 2 project with your Subversion servers again. There are several advantages to using Subversioonn 1.7, many of which Apple summarizes in a related developer FAQ.

The only downside is that you would have to do that with each individual Coda 2 project on your system, to convert them all over. If anyone has found a faster way, let us know!

Option 2

It turns out that Xcode did provide an older, compatible version of SVN 1.6. Instead of updating each Coda 2 project to 1.7.x, you can change Coda 2's preferences to point to this 1.6 version of SVN instead. Assuming you've downloaded XCode 5, you can:

  1. Open up the "Coda 2" app
  2. Go to "File -> Preferences -> Files"

  3. Click on the "Choose" button of the "Subversion Tool Path" option.
  4. Browse through the Finder window to: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/subversion-1.6/bin/svn

That's it. Coda 2 will now use this older version of SVN, which should be compatible with the working copies of your SVN repositories. This is a faster solution, as it doesn't require an update of each of your Coda 2 projects, but the downside is that there's no guarantee that a future upgrade of Xcode won't remove this older SVN version.

Hopefully, whichever solution you choose saves you some headaches and gets you back to work :)

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