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Installation and Files

SmartSVN stores its configuration files per-user. The root directory of SmartSVN’s configuration area contains subdirectories for every major SmartSVN version, so you can use multiple versions concurrently. The location of the configuration root directory depends on the operating system.

Location of SmartSVN’s settings directory

  • Windows: The configuration files are located below %APPDATA%\syntevo\SmartSVN\<major-version>\. Note: Before SmartSVN 5, configurations files have been stored below %USERPROFILE%\.smartsvn\.
  • Mac OS: The configuration files are located below ~/Library/Preferences/SmartSVN/<major-version>/.
  • Unix/Other: The configuration files are located below ~/.smartsvn/<major-version>/.

Tip

You can change the directory where the settings files are stored by changing the property smartsvn.settings.

Notable configuration files

  • accelerators.xml stores the accelerators configuration.
  • license stores your SmartSVN’s license key.
  • log.txt contains debug log information. It’s configured via log4j.xml.
  • passwords is an encrypted file and stores the passwords used throughout SmartSVN.
  • project-defaults.xml stores the default project settings.
  • projects.xml stores all configured projects, including their settings.
  • repositories.xml stores the repository credentials, except the corresponding passwords.
  • settings.xml stores the application-wide Preferences of SmartSVN.
  • tag-branch-layouts.xml stores the configured Tag-Branch-Layouts .
  • tools.xml stores external tools which have been configured in the Preferences. You probably do not want to remove this file: afterwards, all you external tools configurations will be lost.
  • transactionsFrame.xml stores the configuration of the Transactions frame .
  • ui-config.xml stores UI related, more stable settings, e.g. the toolbar configurations. You may remove this file: afterwards, various aspects of the UI will be reset to defaults.
  • ui-settings.xml stores UI related, volatile settings, e.g. window sizes or column widths. You may remove this file: afterwards, various aspects of the UI will be reset to defaults.

Program Updates

SmartSVN stores program updates which have been downloaded automatically through SmartSVN itself by default in the subdirectory updates of the Settings root directory). This allows light-weight, patch-like updates which do not require write access to the actual SmartSVN installation directory. As a consequence, your SmartSVN installation directory is usually not up-to-date, but it will launch the downloaded updates from the updates directory.

Technical Details

The root directory of the Updates directory contains sub-directories for every major version. Such a major version directory contains a control file for the latest downloaded build and a current-file which points to the currently used build. Usually, this will be the highest build which shows up in this directory. The control-file only configures which binaries are part of the build by linking to the actual binaries which are stored in the repo-subdirectory and which are shared among all builds.

Each new build has a corresponding, digitally-signed control file which contains information about all required application files with their download location and the expected file content hash. To reduce band-width, application files only will be downloaded if they are not yet locally available. After download, the content will be verified with the hash from the control file.

When starting SmartSVN, the bootloader.jar from the installation directory is launched. This uses the control file from the Updates directory to determine which updated SmartSVN files to launch that contain the actual application code.

Warning

By modifying the control file or any other contents within the Updates directory, you may easily screw up your SmartSVN installation. Hence, do not touch these files unless you have good reasons to do so.

Company-wide installation

For company-wide installations, the administrator can install SmartSVN on a network share. To make deployment and initial configuration for the users easier, certain configuration files can be prepared and put into the subdirectory default (within SmartSVN’s installation directory). For Mac OS X this default directory must be located in SmartGit.app/Contents/Resources/ (parallel to the Java directory), for other operating systems within SmartGit’s installation directory (parallel to the lib and bin directories).

When a user starts SmartSVN for the first time, following files will be copied from the default directory to his private configuration area:

  • accelerators.xml
  • project-defaults.xml
  • repositories.xml
  • settings.xml
  • tag-branch-layouts.xml
  • tools.xml
  • transactionsFrame.xml
  • ui-config.xml
  • ui-settings.xml

The license file (only for Enterprise licenses and 10+ users Professional licenses) can also be placed into the default directory. In this case, SmartSVN will prefill the License field in the Set Up wizard when a user starts SmartSVN for the first time. When upgrading SmartSVN, this license file will also be used, so users won’t be prompted with an ‘license expired’ message, but can continue working seamlessly.

Note

Typically, you will receive license files from us wrapped into a ZIP archive. In this case you have to unzip the contained license file into the default directory.

JRE search order (Windows)

On Windows, the smartsvn.exe launcher will search for an appropriate JRE in the following order (from top to bottom):

  • Environment variable SMARTSVN_JAVA_HOME
  • Sub-directory jre within SmartSVN’s installation directory
  • Environment variable JAVA_HOME
  • Environment variable JDK_HOME
  • Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Runtime Environment