Andy Chase

When I was thrust rather suddenly into the world of Java development this past May, IntelliJ IDEA was recommended to me as a good IDE. Good is an understatement!

However, one of my few complaints has been lack of support for Subversion; having to jump to the terminal to commit edits isn't the end of the world, but integration is always preferable. There has been a svn4idea plugin kicking around the web for a while, but it requires a native library to work (readily available for Windows, harder to come by for Mac OS X) and at the time it wasn't worth the hassle.

Today I discovered that there is a ready-made .dmg file of the latest version of the svn4idea plugin, and furthermore there's now a Fink package for the svn-javahl library, so there's no need to wrestle with getting everything compiled just-so anymore.

I've got it working. It was still a bit of a chore, though, and I want to write the steps down somewhere in case I ever have to do it again, and in case some other Mac OS X user is trying to get it together.

1. Install the fink svn-javahl package. This will put some files under your /sw directory that you'll need shortly.

2. Create a symbolic link to the svn bindings library in the path where OS X's Java environment looks for libraries. (I have read elsewhere that it's also necessary to change the extension to jnilib, so I went ahead and did that too.) At the terminal:

sudo ln -s /sw/lib/libsvnjavahl.dylib /usr/lib/java/libsvnjavahl.jnilib

3. Download the "Svn-Up Client with Svn4Idea IntelliJ Idea Plugin" disk image from http://www.metissian.com/projects/macosx/subversion/ , unzip it and mount it.

4. In the svn4idea/lib directory, remove the svnjavahl.jar and svn-javahl.jar symbolic links.

5. Create a new symbolic link to the javahl jar installed by Fink. From the terminal:

sudo ln -s /sw/share/java/svn-javahl/svnjavahl.jar svnjavahl.jar

6. In finder, right click on the IntelliJ IDEA application and choose "show package contents"

7. Drag the modified svn4idea folder into the application's "plugins" directory

8. Restart IDEA. If all has gone well, you should now be able to configure the Version Control settings for your projects to use Subversion. If not, tinker around; hopefully this has pointed you in the right direction. (If I've made an error somewhere and you figure it out, please let me know so I can fix it.)