Anonymous or Developer checkout with TortoiseCVS

TortoiseCVS lets you work with files under CVS version control directly from Windows Explorer. It's freely available under the GPL. The following tutorial teaches how to use TortoiseCVS with Drupal.

There is also a short video that shows how to use TortoiseCVS to maintain a contributed project in the Videos and Slides section of the handbook.

• Download TortoiseCVS from http://www.tortoisecvs.org/download.shtml and install it.
• In Windows Explorer, select the folder under which you want the Drupal source directory to live. Right-click on it. There are two new sections in the context menu - CVS Checkout and CVS >. Select CVS Checkout.
• Fill in the following fields:

  Protocol: Password server (:pserver:)
  Server: cvs.drupal.org
  Repository folder: /cvs/drupal (main distro) or /cvs/drupal-contrib (contributions)
  User name: anonymous or CVS username
  Password: when asked, password for anonymous user is anonymous
  Module:

  • drupal (for Drupal itelf),
  • contributions (for the entire contributions directory), or
  • contributions/path (ex: contributions/modules/event) to retrieve a specific module, theme, etc.

  Note: if you don't know the module name then you can click on "Fetch list" button, TortoiseCVS will retrieve the module folders name.
  

• Choose the version to check out. Press Update list... to fetch a list of available options.
  Note: Use the password "anonymous" when prompted and press "OK".
  
• (optional) Set the folder that's created on your system: select the "Options" tab, and under "Name of folder to create" enter your choice. By default, you'll get folders created to match the structure you've entered in the 'Module' field. You might want to change this if you're checking out a contributed module directly into a Drupal installation's sites/all/modules folder: in this case, set the folder name to the module name.
  
• press "OK".
• You may be asked for password at this point. Enter "anonymous" and press "OK".
• A log window which monitors the checkout process will appear. Checking out the whole contributions repository will take a while.
• If everything works, you will see the message "Success, CVS operation completed" at the end of the log. A new directory (named like the module selected before) with the sources will be created.
• To bring your Drupal source tree up-to-date, select it's root folder ("drupal" / "contributions"), right-click it and do a "CVS Update".

You can also generate patch files with TortoiseCVS. Just select the files which you have patched in Windows Explorer. Then right click into the CVS => Make Patch menu item. Then you may wish to read Creating and sending your patches

Retrieving an older version of Drupal or Drupal modules

The process above retrieves the freshest files from the repository (the so-called HEAD branch). These are sometimes unstable. To get Drupal modules and themes that are stable and ready for production (which you can also download from the Drupal downloads page), follow the process described above, but before hitting "OK" you need to:

• Click on the "Revision" tab on the CVS checkout dialog.
• Enable "Get tag/branch".
• If this is the first time you've used this option, click "Update list..." to obtain a full list of Drupal branch numbers.
• Select the branch you're interested in from the list. For example, Drupal 4.5 would be DRUPAL-4-5 and Drupal 4.6.3 would be DRUPAL-4-6-3.
• Hit OK.

Note: TortoiseCVS since 1.10.1 version supports 64 bit OS