Automatic Properties in Subversion

Properties are a powerful and useful feature of Apache Subversion, but they can be easily overlooked. If you’re regularly using properties in your project, it’s a good idea to configure Subversion to add properties to new files automatically.

Subversion already sets some properties automatically: whenever you add a new file, it sets a value for the MIME type and decides whether the file is executable. You can extend this by leveraging Subversion’s automatic property setting feature “svn:auto-props.” With auto-props enabled, you can perform tasks such as automatically inserting keywords into text files and ensuring every file has EOLs that are consistent with the OS.

To enable auto-props:

1) Locate and open the config file on your local machine.

2) Scroll down to the [miscellany] section and uncomment the following line:

# enable-auto-props = yes

3) Just below this line, edit the ‘Section for configuring automatic properties’ text according to the properties you want to apply to your files.