svn - Can you do a partial checkout with Subversion?

Question

If I had 20 directories under trunk/ with lots of files in each and only needed 3 of those directories, would it be possible to do a Subversion checkout with only those 3 directories under trunk?

Answer 1

Indeed, thanks to the comments to my post here, it looks like sparse directories are the way to go. I believe the following should do it:

svn checkout --depth empty http://svnserver/trunk/proj
svn update --set-depth infinity proj/foo
svn update --set-depth infinity proj/bar
svn update --set-depth infinity proj/baz

Alternatively, --depth immediates instead of empty checks out files and directories in trunk/proj without their contents. That way you can see which directories exist in the repository.

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As mentioned in @zigdon's answer, you can also do a non-recursive checkout. This is an older and less flexible way to achieve a similar effect:

svn checkout --non-recursive http://svnserver/trunk/proj
svn update trunk/foo
svn update trunk/bar
svn update trunk/baz