uPortal uses Subversion (SVN) for its code repository. As an alternative to downloading a packaged uPortal distribution, you can instead check out the project from SVN. You'll need to do this if you intend to develop uPortal itself, or submit patches, and in many cases it is desirable to perform "vendor imports" and be able to interrogate SVN for the history of a file.
Fisheye
You can review source control information via the web, e.g. histories of files and contents of changesets.
As of Feb. 7, 2006 the JA-SIG-hosted web interface for exploring the JA-SIG SVN repository is an instance of the Fisheye source control visualization tool. You can use this web interface to the uPortal SVN code repository to browse through all the branches of the uPortal code.
Anonymous access to SVN
You can access the uPortal code via anonymous access using a SVN client. A SVN client can be downloaded from Tigris, the SVN developers.
Next, checkout the uportal project with the following command:
svn co https://www.ja-sig.org/svn/uPortal/tags/<tag-name> <local-path>
Not sure what tag you'd like to check out? You can access SVN through your web browser to browse the list of available tags.
https://www.ja-sig.org/svn/uPortal/trunk is the latest and greatest code. All projects following SVN conventions have a "trunk" folder.
uPortal portlets are kept as a separate projects under the portlets folder. Use the following command to checkout the latest code portlet project:
svn co https://www.ja-sig.org/svn/portlets/<portlet-name>/trunk
How do you know what portlets are available for checkout? You guessed it: take a peek via your web browser.
Avoid checking out huge amounts of code
Previewing a URL via your web browser before executing an svn checkout command against it is a good practice for avoiding accidentally checking out more code than you intend.
For instance, this command will check out a full copy of every uPortal release ever. You probably don't want to do this.
svn co https://www.ja-sig.org/svn/uPortal/
There are other projects in JA-SIG SVN besides uPortal and portlets. (Channels, CAS, ...). You can review the listing of JA-SIG SVN projects via your web browser.