How to download the latest version of Joomla 1.6

Written by Wilco Jansen Friday, 16 October 2009 22:00

Joomla 1.6 cue ball At the current download page of Joomla you will not find a nightly build download option as it was available earlier on (1.0 and early 1.5 development). There are a lot of people who are eager to see the current state of 1.6 and would like to download a development version. In this article I will explain how you can get a copy of the latest development version.

Before we show the tools that can make it happen, I would like to explain a bit more on how the Joomla codebase is maintained. The Joomla development team is storing changes to the code into a software versioning system called Subversion. The code is stored in a so called commit, saying no more that the changes that de developer has made locally are uploaded to a central repository. That repository can be access by a web browser or tools that have been build for easy maintenance of the software. It is possible to go back to every state of the development by reverting versions since every change is stored in this central repository.

When an official release is build a copy is extracted from this software repository and from that extract the compressed files are generated that you then can download. For official releases this process is automated, but if you are interested in the last version of the code you can manually export the data from the repository. What I normally do in such a situation is export the data into the webfolder of my development system, in my case that is '/var/www'.

It is actually pretty straight forward, let me give an example of a command line export on Ubuntu (subversion client is installed of course).

cd /var/www
svn export http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/ --username anonymous
Authentication realm: <http://joomlacode.org:80> Document repository
Password for 'anonymous':

As you can see we do a checkout from the 1.6 trunk location (http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/) and use anonymous access to retrieve the repository. There are several different clients available that can read the subversion repository on a variety of platforms (Windows, Linux, MAC). Under windows you can use for example Turtoise SVN, all you then need to do is to right-click on a folder in the explorer en you can select the export option. Obviously it would be the easiest way if the daily build option was re-introduced on joomla.org...

About the author Wilco Jansen

Wilco was born in 1967 in the Netherlands where he still lives. After years of being a programmer Wilco has worked as project manager and IT manager. Discovered Joomla! when he was creating his own content management system, and never lost focus after then. Joined core team as development coordinator in May 2006 just helping to make Joomla! even better then it is already. Wilco has been deeply involved in the Joomla project as Google summer of code program manager 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions, co-organizer of the Google Highly Participation contest in 2008, first ever development coordinator, creator of the Joomla bug squad, member of the board of Open source matters, regular speaker on world wide conference advocating Joomla and much, much more. Wilco has a bachelor degree in business and information engineering and studied Master of Science knowledge and information engineering at the Middlesex University in London.

More about Wilco Jansen

There are 7 comments posted.

Re: Why not direct link to the builds?

# 1 - Posted by: Ivo Apostolov on 2009-10-17 21:12:06

Wilco, the current (last day) SVN is always store in:

http://dev.joomla.org/nightly/joomla_trunk/

Isn't this the easiest way?

# 2 - Posted by: Wilco Jansen on 2009-10-17 22:34:06

Hi Ivo,

If you take a look at http://dev.joomla.org you will notice that the url you pointed out should be obsolete since dev.joomla.org was abandoned more then a year ago. If the links still is there, I think it is a co-incidence, and maybe good to use...but when you absolutely want the latest dev version, you should export the trunk ;-)

Re: Super

# 3 - Posted by: pop on 2009-10-21 01:03:01

Re: Pros and Cons

# 4 - Posted by: Pink oldie on 2009-10-24 00:30:54

Hi Wilco,

I'm looking at 1.6 version for my company, but the developer is outsourced overseas. In the event I make add ons or changes later without using the same developer overseas, will that mean he can still access the Repository since it is an open place storage? I'm concern about who can control the access to Repository and who will have the ability to peep through the information or even cause any issues with it.

# 5 - Posted by: kamera stative on 2009-10-24 06:16:50

It will be a good one to have the latest version for your the web development.It will be classy from the previous once.

# 6 - Posted by: Wilco Jansen on 2009-10-24 21:32:51

The Joomla repository can only be accessed by the Joomla developers with commit access. Unless you hire one of those guys, it is impossible they store you extension code on the Joomlacode repository ;-)

It is a good practice to use your own versioning system, and you can grant the oversees developer access, and when he is done developing you simply revoke his access and you will be fine...

# 7 - Posted by: Aaron on 2009-12-23 13:19:22

Genius!

Thanks, Wilco. I've been dying to take a look at 1.6. :)

Help for creating beautiful comments.