Brian Ritchie's Blog

RSS Subversion Change Log

Recently I needed to put the change log from our subversion repository online.  Luckily, Martin Pittenauer put together a great XSLT script that turns the XML produced by the SVN Log command into an RSS feed.  It utilizes eXSLT so you'll need to use a compatible XSLT tranform tool.

Step 1) Download the XSLT from Martin Pittenauer:
See his blog post for details http://codingmonkeys.de/map/log/articles/2003/10/07/svnlog-xslt

Step 2) Modify XSLT
Change the description, copyright, etc. in the XSLT to match your project

Step 3) Create script to pull log from XML and convert to RSS: 

• On Windows: changelog-rss.bat
  svn -v --xml --limit 100 log http://svnserver/svn/project/trunk/ > log.xml
  nxslt2 log.xml svnlog.xslt -o log-rss.xml
  
  
• On Linux: changelog-rss.sh
  svn -v --xml --limit 100 log http://svnserver/svn/project/trunk/ > log.xml
  xsltproc svnlog.xslt log.xml > log-rss.xml

Step 4) Schedule it using Windows Task Scheduler or CRON

This will publish your recent changes out to the feed.  It can then be viewed by IE7 or another RSS reader.

NOTE: You can pull recent changes on a branch, etc. by changing the URL passed to the svn log command.