I just updated XCode and the command line tools to 11.4. Now when I run svn it says "svn: error: The subversion command line tools are no longer provided by Xcode". The release notes say "Command line tool support for Subversion — including svn, git-svn, and related commands is no longer provided by Xcode. If you need Subversion or related command line tools the you need to install the Command Line Tools package by running xcode-select --install." I seem to be in a loop here, as the tools are installed. Has anyone experienced this problem and resolved it?
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Possible they nuked it from the CLI tools too and didn't update the message. Consider installing svn from homebrew instead. – Chuck Adams Mar 26 '20 at 14:33
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1I ended up deleting xcode and the command line tools manually, then installing the command line tools directly with the xcode-select --install. The tools that come with XCode as the ones missing svn. – Jesse Mar 26 '20 at 15:22
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@Jesse would you please select the best answer? – Hossein Apr 30 '20 at 09:10
10 Answers
macOS Catalina
I had the same issue after upgrading to Catalina 10.15. It's clearly mentioned in the Apple website that SVN is deprecated in Xcode 11:
You can find it here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos_release_notes/macos_catalina_10_15_release_notes
Command line tool support for Subversion — including svn, git-svn, and related commands — is no longer provided by Xcode.
The solution is to install the standalone Command Line Tools package instead:
sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
followed by:
sudo xcode-select --install
This will replace the bundled Command Line Tools with the standalone package.
If it doesn't work for you then try to install it with brew
.
brew install svn
brew
is a package manager for MacOS so if you don't have it installed then you can simply install it: https://brew.sh/
macOS Big Sur
I faced the same issue Today (16th November 2020) after upgrading to MacOS Big Sur. I was able to fix it by installing the SVN again using brew install svn
command.
If you faced permission errors after running above command, you can fix it by running following command.
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/*

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Thanks! That did it for me. I thought I refreshed it after upgrading the OS but this did the trick. – Shane Duan Mar 31 '20 at 21:26
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It worked for me before, but does not work anymore in MacOS 10.15.5 Any suggestions? – paul Jun 17 '20 at 10:43
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Thanks @Hossein. I decided years ago to not use brew. Tended to collect a huge amount of packages with a parallel system. Compiled svn from source this time. Worked quite nicely. – paul Jun 21 '20 at 17:06
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try this https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/issues/52490#issuecomment-658239604 – Liang Zeng Jul 14 '20 at 15:18
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Installed svn from Brew, still didn't work with Mac Catalina 10.15.6 Netbeans 12.1. In netbeans change Preferences - Team - Versioning - Subversion, "Path to SVN executable file:" /usr/local/bin. Now works! – Steven Neiner Oct 15 '20 at 16:02
I had same issue from Netbeans and have done the following from command line and now all fine
sudo xcode-select --install

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2Did not work for me, message was `xcode-select: error: command line tools are already installed, use "Software Update" to install updates`. While solution by @Hossein did the trick – Marco Torchiano Apr 06 '20 at 19:41
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on Monterey (OS X 12.2): i saw the same message as Marco, and did `brew install svn`, which worked – cainesap Feb 10 '22 at 13:49
- /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
- brew install svn

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Coming from a FreeBSD background we elected to install SVN via MacPorts which is akin to FreeBSD Ports. So basically one would first need to install MacPorts and then install SVN as follows:
sudo port install subversion
Some details -
Install MacPorts: https://www.macports.org/install.php
Install SVN: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/howto/Subversion
It took less than five(5) minutes and works well for us.

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I switched to SVNKIT which works very well for my purposes. Since I'm doing a lot of Java development is no drawback for me that SVNKIT is based on Java. The big advantage is that SVNKIT will still work even if Apple throws SVN out completely.

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I found svn still available on my Mac (upgraded from 10.15.x -> Big Sur, including XCode upgrade) in
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/svn
In the Apple Developers forum I read the suggestion to make an alias, which worked for me. However, considering svn is being dropped by Apple, this will probably not work on new installs, but it could be useful for those of us that just want it to work for now after upgrading.
alias svn=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/svn
Note: I found it easier to just make a symbolic link to svn:
ln -s /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/svn /usr/local/bin/svn

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my mac os version is macOs Catalina 10.15.5,I try
sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
sudo xcode-select --install
brew install svn
but it not work.so I try to install with source code.It's work!
tar xvf subversion-1.14.0.tar.gz
cd subversion-1.14.0
./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/opt/apr --with-apr-util=/usr/local/opt/apr-util
make
now,you can find it in /usr/local/bin/

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Looks like there is a step missing here. Where did you get subversion-1.14.0.tar.gz? – Joe Strout Aug 29 '20 at 14:30
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Also, when I try this (with the tarball downloaded from https://subversion.apache.org/download.cgi), I get an error from configure: `checking for APR... configure: error: the --with-apr parameter is incorrect. It must specify an install prefix, a build directory, or an apr-config file.` – Joe Strout Aug 29 '20 at 14:39
Based partly on the other answers here, I built from source with this procedure:
- Download & unpack svn source tarball (NOT zip file!) from https://subversion.apache.org/download.cgi
cd subversion-1.14.0
./get-deps
(this seems to have downloaded apr and apr-util but not built them)cd apr
sudo mkdir /usr/local/opt
(because I did not already have such a directory on a fresh Mac)./configure --prefix=/usr/local/opt/apr
make
make test
(saw lots of "OK" and "SUCCESS", plus one failure in "testsock")sudo make install
cd ../apr-util
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/opt/apr-util --with-apr=/usr/local/opt/apr
cd ..
make
./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/opt/apr --with-apr-util=/usr/local/opt/apr-util --with-lz4=internal --with-utf8proc=internal
make
sudo make install

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But it's worth noting that this build does not support http or https. So I ended up not using it, and trying the homebrew installation instead. – Joe Strout Aug 31 '20 at 23:43
The top instructions (removing the command line tools, xcode-select --install, and brew install svn) worked for me (Monterey, 12.5.1, on an M1 pro). Thanks! However, after I did the brew install, I had to manually remove the old svn version from /opt/local/bin before the new version would run. (discovered with $ which svn). Might be the result of migrating from the old laptop to the new one.

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