2.4 Checking out a Working Copy

Now that we have a project in our repository, we need to create a working copy to use for day-to-day work. Note that the act of importing a folder does not automatically turn that folder into a working copy. The Subversion term for creating a fresh working copy is Checkout. We are going to checkout the Widget1 folder of our repository into a development folder on the PC called C:\Projects\Widget1-Dev. Create that folder, then right click on it and select TortoiseSVN → Checkout.... Then enter the URL to checkout, in this case file:///c:/svn_repos/trunk/Widget1 and click on OK. Our development folder is then populated with files from the repository.

Note: In the default setting, the checkout menu item is not located in the TortoiseSVN submenu but is shown at the top explorer menu. TortoiseSVN commands that are not in the submenu have SVN prepended: SVN Checkout...

You will notice that the appearance of this folder is different from our original folder. Every file has a green check mark in the bottom left corner. These are TortoiseSVN's status icons which are only present in a working copy. The green state indicates that the file is unchanged from the version in the repository.