How do I check a project out of CVS?
Author: Deron Eriksson
Description: This tutorial demonstrates how to check a project out of CVS.
Tutorial created using: Windows XP || JDK 1.5.0_09 || Eclipse Web Tools Platform 2.0 (Eclipse 3.3.0)


In another tutorial, we demonstrated how to connect to a CVSW repository in EclipseSW. In the CVS Repository Exploring perspective, we added a new repository location to the CVS Repositories view. We also saw how to check a project into CVS from Eclipse. In this short tutorial, we'll see how to check a project out from a CVS repository.

To check out a project from CVS, go to the CVS Repository Exploring perspective and go to the CVS Repositories view and open the CVS repository that holds the project that you'd like to check out. I opened the derbizz repository that I created in another tutorial and opened the HEAD folder. The repository has one project called demo-project. To check it out into Eclipse, I right-clicked the demo-project folder and selected Check Out.

Checking out 'demo-project'

I returned to my Resource perspective and looked at the Navigator view. The demo-project is now checked out in Eclipse as a JavaSW project. Eclipse automatically created the bin folder and any classes inside of it. That's all there is to checking out a project from CVS into Eclipse!

'demo-project' in Navigator View

Eclipse does offer further options for checking out projects. To see these options, instead of selecting 'Check Out', you can select 'Check Out As'.

Check Out As...

Here, I specify to check out the project again, but this time call it 'demo-project-2'.

Check out as a project in the workspace

The workspace location is configurable.

User default workspace location

You can check out a tagged version of your project in case you'd like to work on a particular version of your project.

Select Tag

After checking out the project as 'demo-project-2', back in my Navigator view I can see that I actually have the project checked out twice, but with two different names.

'demo-project' and 'demo-project-2' in Navigator View

Normally you only check out a project once with its default name.