Best version control for a one man web app?

Question

I'm just learning how to do things, and want to start using some sort of version control for a web app.

What's most appropriate for deploying a python or php web app on my own? I'm using linux and have a linux server.

Thanks!

Answer 1

SVN is great.

Answer 2

SVN would been my first choice. If I have to take a second choice I would go to CVS.

Answer 3

One of the most popular models out there today is Subversion. It's generally easy to setup & configure and is able to handle multiple platforms.

Answer 4

If I had not bumped into git, I would've doubtless gone with SVN. Having said that, I would recommend git.

Answer 5

SVN. If one does not need concurrent access (which is your case), it is VERY easy to setup as no server is required at all. Definitely your weapon of choice.

Answer 6

The answer really depends on your way of thinking. I personally had problems switching to subversion from SourceSafe. If you come from microsoft shop, I'd suggest using SourceGear Vault, it is free for <=2 users. If you come from non microsoft area, then using subversion would be preferrable. Also please consider git if working on linux. HTH, Valve.

Answer 7

Nowadays the hype around DVCS.

I prefer Bazaar.

Because of it's name, the support, the feature set, and it works well on my window$ machine too.

Answer 8

I wholeheartedly agree with SVN. Command-line SVN is quite easy too.

Answer 9

While I like svn a lot, I've found mercurial handy for having the whole repository locally. (the same goes for git, but its interface is a little less polished in my opinion.)

Answer 10

Subversion is a good choice. For the client, there's TortoiseSVN (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/) that integrates with the shell and lets you do things with a right click on a folder. For integration with Visual Studio (I'll assume that's your environment) there's VisualSVN (http://www.visualsvn.com/) and AnhkSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/). For the server there's a one-click installer you can find here (http://svn1clicksetup.tigris.org/) that does the setup in a snap. VisualSVN also has a (free) server that you can use which provides it's own web access and security (rather than using apache) and has a mmc-snapin for managing/creating repositories and users.

Answer 11

Nowadays, I would certainly go with a distributed version control system. Setup is faster since you don't need to set up a version control server and everything, all you usually need to do is initialize a certain directory within your development box for version control and you're good to go. They also seem like the way to go these days. If it were 2001, I would recommend a centralized system like Subversion. But it's 2008, everyone is moving to distributed systems and user interfaces and supporting tools tend to get better.

Here are some suggestions for you:

• Darcs: Easy to learn and has all the features you will usually need
• Mercurial
• Git: Powerful. May take some time to understand but evolves rapidly

All three of them should be readily available in your Linux-based OS through the usual package management solutions.

Answer 12

Personally I use monotone, learning a DVCS is definitely the way forward.

Answer 13

For a one-man job, pretty much any revision control system will do the job. It's when you get into multiple people, and past that into multiple repositories, where there start to be differences.

Given that, I'd go with whatever Free Software system your development environment supports best. I see Subversion and Git mentioned and both are fine choices.

Answer 14

I'm using unfuddle.com and I love it. It's free for a one person web app

Answer 15

I once used Perforce and was impressed with it. There's GUI and command line versions and it supports Windows, Linux, Mac and Unix for both the server and client. It integrates with Eclipse and has APIs for writing your own client applications (C/C++, Ruby, Perl, Python) It only supprts two users and five workspaces before you need to buy licenses though (but that is within the scope of this question).

Skizz

Answer 16

I'm not able to answer the question as asked, because I don't develop on a Linux server.

But maybe this experience has a counterpart in Linux world.

I use a local-on-my-LAN-only IIS server (actually on an old laptop that no longer travels but works as a little server). I have VSS installed on that server too. There is an integration between the IIS Server, the FrontPage extensions on that server, and the VSS.

The upshot is that I can use FrontPage to build and edit my site and build a development image that is always backed up in VSS, and I can check out, check in, and do all of that from within FrontPage.

Now, the way I publish is I take advantage of the sharing capability of VSS so I have a deployment image that shares with the project that is actually an IIS web site. I have a deployment-image directory that I can transfer the latest checked-in material to (material that has not changed is not updated). I then deploy the deployment image to the hosted, public web site using FTP (again, only transfering new and updated files).

I present all of these details to suggest what might be the use-case of interest, even though a different solution approach is needed with Linux.

If I wasn't using a tool that integrated with the web server and also the source control at the server, I could do something similar by checking the VSS material in and out of a local directory and then pushing the updated VSS project to the IIS server web-pages directory hierarchy. The workflow is a little more clumsy. In this case, I would not edit pages directly on the development web server unless I could lock check-in pages as read-only or something.

Does this suggest anything that might be appealing in the Linux server case?

Answer 17

Definitively Mercurial is a good choice, quick, easy to use, perfect for working alone, or with multiple other developer, perfectly multiplateform, handles merges, branches, etc. very simply, plugin based, there are great tools out there such as nice IDE plugins (notably Netbeans and Eclipse).

Robust, it works just as you a expect such a tool to work, not like SVN (and I have years of day to day)...

Both Sun, Xen and Mozilla host all their repos on Mercurial. We're currently moving from SVN to Mercurial after a 6 month daily test, without any regret.

Answer 18

CVS - No, I'm not joking. Not that it is better (it is not) or the simplest (it isn't), but it really doesn't matter at the end of the day. The important thing is to get started with ANY version control system even if it is a one-developer shop, even if it is CVS.