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 a

Answer 1

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 2

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 3

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

Answer 4

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 5

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 6

SVN is great.