If you’re like me, you run your WordPress installation off of a SVN checkout, making it far easier to stay up to date with new versions. In fact, using version control checkouts is an excellent way to maintain web applications running on production servers, especially if they don’t require compilation.

However, if you recently tried to upgrade to the latest version using the instructions at the WordPress Codex, you likely ran into a problem with an error mesage like this:

$ svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/ . 
svn: 'http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/'
is not the same repository as
'http://svn.automattic.com'

This is because sometime between the release of 2.7.1 and 2.8, the URL of the WordPress SVN repository changed from http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/ to http://core.svn.wordpress.org/.

The fix

To properly update WordPress after this change in the SVN repository location, we need to first run the svn sw –relocate command to relocate or point the checkout to the new repository URL:

svn sw --relocate http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.7.1/ http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.7.1/ .

Note that we are just changing the checkout’s repository from the old one to the new one – we aren’t yet pointing to the new version. (Note – this assumes you are currently running version 2.7.1)

After this, we can now we can switch to the new version.

svn sw http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8/ .

Additionally, it’s worthwhile to run an svn up after this, just to make sure externals (like Akismet) are properly updated as well.

Note that this overall process has two steps – first pointing the checkout to the new repository URL, without switching to the new version, and then switching to the new version. I am not sure if you have to do it in two steps like this, but I can confirm this worked for me, and judging by the instructions in the SVN documentation, this is likely the correct way.