Most of my work these days uses GIT repositories, however on occasion I have need to connect to subversion. This weekend though an update to eclipse broke my subclipse plugin. The reason turned out to be that the newest version of subversion available through Ubuntu's default source is 1.9, but the updated plugin required 1.11.

Fortunately its relatively simple to upgrade to a newer version.

Note: These step mention libsvn-java which is required for java applications which utilize subversion (such as eclipse). If you don't need it then skip any references to it.

Step 1: Add the wandisco release to sources

Create a source list file in the sources.list.d directory named subversion111.list pointing to the ubuntu release for 1.11 and install the public key

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://opensource.wandisco.com/ubuntu `lsb_release -cs` svn111" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/subversion111.list'
sudo wget -q http://opensource.wandisco.com/wandisco-debian-new.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Step 2: Uninstall old version

Next we remove the currently installed version of subversion as well as libsvn-java if we installed it.

sudo apt-get remove subversion
sudo apt-get remove libsvn-java

Step 3: Update apt-get

This will read from our source lists and find the newer version of subversion

sudo apt-get update

Step 4: Install new version

Now we can (re)install subversion and we will get version 1.11.

sudo apt-get install subversion
sudo apt-get install libsvn-java

To double check run this command to confirm the version installed.

svn --version