Those of you who know what SVN is, feel free to skip this article. Those of you who are not familiar with SVN, this is a must-read. If you use standard FTP to upload all Magento files, you may find this process very time consuming. Magento 1.1.8 has over 6.700 files in over 2.200 folders. FTPing can sometimes take few hours on some servers. Let’s look at alternatives.

Both alternatives require SSH access to the server. I’m aware that some low quality webhosting providers do not provide you with SSH info immediately. If you don’t have SSH info, ask webhosting support. If they don’t give it to you, change webhosting provider. Make it a rule, you’ll make your life much easier.

Get yourself familiar with basic UNIX commands first.

Alternative 1: SVN

In the Downloads tab on Magento website, you will notice SVN page link:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/svn

You can see how short this page is. You have 2 commands you can run at SVN. You can chack latest work in progress or you can checkout latest stable version. If you are starting to develop a real project, you will probably want a stable version.

Let’s look at the original command:
svn checkout http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1

This is probably not the exact command you wish to run on the server. It will place the files in trunk folder. I will assume two things:

1. You will want the clean code
2. You will want to specify the folder where you wish Magento to be installed

If those are correct assumptions, you will want to run a command similar to this one:
svn export --force http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1 shop

• svn – This is the command
• export - The difference with checkout is that with an export, you get a clean copy of the code, and none of the subversion metadata, so it can’t be used  to svn up or make further changes.
• –force – you will overwrite all of the folders and files if they exist
• http://svn.magentocommerce.com/source/branches/1.1 - this is SVN URL. Leave it intact.
• shop - the name of the folder you wish to place the files into. You may set the folders name to your likings.

Read more about SVN at Wikipedia SVN Page and Subversion official site.

Alternative 2: Installing via wget

I will not be very descriptive here. This alternative is very well explained on Magento website in Wiki section:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/groups/227/installing_magento_via_shell_ssh

Both scenarios will only place files. You still need to run web based installer afterward. But, that is another story.

By Tomislav Bilic from Inchoo.net

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