This was originally written by Jake at http://blog.unquiet.net/archives/2005/11/06/helpful-rake-tasks-for-using-rails-with-subversion/ .. but that site seems not to be showing content properly, so I salvaged this from the Google cache. I also added two new lines to make it remove /tmp folder which is now in Rails.

Just dump this into a file called svn.rake in your lib/tasks folder, and use rake configure_for_svn to sort everything out on your initial check out:

desc "Configure Subversion for Rails"
task :configure_for_svn do
  system "svn remove log/*"
  system "svn commit -m 'removing all log files from subversion'"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log/'
  system "svn update log/"
  system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring all files in /log/ ending in .log'"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*.db" db/'
  system "svn update db/"
  system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring all files in /db/ ending in .db'"
  system "svn move config/database.yml config/database.example"
  system "svn commit -m 'Moving database.yml to database.example to provide a template for anyone who checks out the code'"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "database.yml" config/'
  system "svn update config/"
  system "svn commit -m 'Ignoring database.yml'"
  system "svn remove tmp/*"
  system "svn commit -m 'Removing /tmp/ folder'"
  system 'svn propset svn:ignore "*" tmp/'
end
   
desc "Add new files to subversion"
task :add_new_files do
   system "svn status | grep '^\?' | sed -e 's/? *//' | sed -e 's/ /\ /g' | xargs svn add"
end

desc "shortcut for adding new files"
task :add => [ :add_new_files ]

svn import railsproject svn://whatever/railsproject/trunk

Then check out to a new location with:

svn co svn://whatever/railsproject/trunk railsproject

Then do all the housekeeping from the railsproject folder:

svn remove log/*
svn commit -m "Removed log files"
svn propset svn:ignore "*.log" log/
svn update log/
svn commit -m "Ignoring log files"
svn move config/database.yml config/database.example
svn propset svn:ignore "database.yml" config/
svn update config/
svn commit -m "Moved database file and ignoring future database.yml"

Mostly poached from http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowtoUseRailsWithSubversion