Setting up a Rails Project that is kept under svn and uses svn:externals for plugins for use locally with Git

Currently git doesn’t support repositories within repositories. This becomes a problem when we are working with Rails projects that use plugins linked externally. If you are just using subversion you’d generally manage plugins using svn:externals or Piston if you’re wise. There is a tool called Giston, which addresses that problem in the Git world. Unfortunately I couldn’t get that to work.

Using symlinks

The solution I’m using combines two solutions from

• new bamboo
• sanity, inc

The technique is to use symlinks from your projects vendor library to seperate Git repositories of Rails and the plugins you are using. Sanity, Inc provides a GIT repository of the Rails SVN repository at git://git.sanityinc.com/rails.git. Creating this probably took days, but now its done, its very small (9MB) and quick to download.

Now you can link from your project to this repository.

cd myrailsproj/vendor ln -s pathToSanityRailsGit rails

The fact that you can change which version of rails you are working against in just a few seconds is very cool e.g.

# In Git Repository for Rails git checkout -b 2-0-stable origin/2-0-stable

will change you to stable Rails2. Use git-branch -a to see whats available.