If you’re using SVN to control your web application, your certainly need to deny access to .svn sub-directories.

With Apache2

    <DirectoryMatch "^/.*/\.svn/">
            Order allow,deny
            Deny from all
    </DirectoryMatch>

With lighttpd

    $HTTP["url"] =~ "/\.svn/" {
        url.access-deny = ( "" )
    }

Sometimes you need to retrieve a single file from SVN without doing a checkout on the repository.

SVN provides the svn cat to output the content of a file. You can redirect the output to get the file as :

svn cat https://svn.mydomain.com/project/folder/file.ext > file.ext

You can also use a simple shell script to do the work :

$ cat svnget

#!/bin/sh

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
        echo
        echo "Usage : $0 <SVN-URL>"
        echo
        exit
fi

fn=`basename $1`
svn cat $1 > $fn