SVN directly to tar

The easiest way to make a copy of the latest version of a repository without all the .svn folders is to use the svn export command.

Here's how I would make the archive:

$ svn export URL PATH ; tar czf exported_copy.tgz PATH

Where URL is the URL of your svn repository and PATH is a local path suitable for saving a copy of the exported repository. I don't know a way to do it more directly than this. Unfortunately you do end up with the exported copy hanging around, so you might just want to put the whole thing in a short bash script which then deletes the temp files afterwards.

EDIT: While this is the easiest method and is what I used as well I would be careful. In my research I found this http://narfation.org/2009/01/08/creating-recreatable-tar-gz-from-svn which clearly tells us the problem of preserved group/user ownership which causes problems when deploying to another system. I have tried this script with modifications of my own to suit my purpose and you might benefit as well.

Maybe version 1.23 of tar allows you to exclude all versioning files from command line but unfortunately don't work on my 1.20 version:

tar --exclude-vcs -cvzf archive.tar.gz directory/

Go to the subversion working directory (checkout) and run this:

find -name .svn -prune -o -print | cpio -o -H tar | gzip > archive.tar.gz

If you're using GNU utilities you can also run:

find -name .svn -prune -o -print0 | cpio -o -0 -H tar | gzip > archive.tar.gz

If possible, I would recommend using the ustar format (-H ustar).