How can I get the Subversion revision number in PHP?

I want to have my PHP application labeled with the revision number which it uses, but I don't want to use CruiseControl or update a file and upload it every time. How should I do it?

SVN keywords is not a good solution. As others pointed out adding $Revision$ in a file only affects the specific file, which may not change for a long time.

Remembering to "edit" a file (by adding or removing a blank line) before every commit is pointless. You could as well just type the revision by hand.

One good way to do it (that I know of) is to have an automated deployment process (which is always a good thing) and using the command svnversion. Here is what I do:

Wherever I need the revision I do an include: <?php include 'version.php'; ?>. This "version.php" file only has the revision number. Moreover it is not part of the repository (it set to be ignored). Here is how I create it:

1) On projects where SVN is installed on the server, I also use it for deployment. Getting the latest version to the server I have a script that among other things does the following (it runs on the server):

cd /var/www/project
svn update
rm version.php
svnversion > version.php

2) On projects where SVN is not installed my deployment script is more complex: it creates the version.php file locally, zips the code, uploads and extracts it

Assuming your webroot is a checked-out copy of the subversion tree, you could parse the /.svn/entries file and hook out the revision number (4th line here)...

In PHP:

$svn = File('.svn/entries');
$svnrev = $svn[3];
unset($svn);

This is how I got it to work. If your server is setup to allow shell_exec AND you have SVN installed just run:

$revision = `svnversion`;

or

$revision = shell_exec('svnversion');