Manage your project with version control and code repository

In this blog post, we are going to talk about version control and repositories and some (of the many) open-source systems, free code repository platforms. Let’s start first with definitions!

What is Software Version Control?

A Version Control System (VCS) enables you to efficiently manage and collaborate on code changes with others. Version control systems have a number of advantages, including:

• The ability to go back in time to review and restore previous versions of files.

• The ability to find differences between two versions of the same file.

• A log or record of who made changes at a given moment.

• Multiple user mechanisms for jointly editing files, resolving conflicting changes, and merging them together.

What is a code repository?

A code repository is a place where you keep your code! That’s nothing out of the ordinary. The code repository you choose holds the source code while the version system software archives that code.

Let’s highlight some code repository capabilities:

• Prepares your code for production release

• Keep track of the changes in the code with statistics and analytics.

• Safeguards your code

• Provides a version control option to ensure that all changes to your code are tracked and you know who made what modifications. You can also go back to the version of the code before “everything went wrong.”

• Simplifies the process of integrating modifications made by developers.

• Because numerous developers can work on the same projects, modules, and even code lines, it provides and supports cooperation principles.

Open-source version control systems

There are several open-source version control systems available including:

• CVS is widely used in both open source and proprietary software development projects and is generally considered to be the best freely available, full-featured version control tool
• SVN exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations
• Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency
• Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface

Free code repository platforms

There are many free code repository platforms, we selected the following:

• GitHub offers the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git, plus its own features
• GitLab is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git-repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking and continuous integration and deployment pipeline features, using an open-source license
• BitBucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories
• SourceForge is a web-based service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software

Wrap-up

There are more free, open-source systems you can use to do the magic with your code, and more things to talk about when it’s referring to code. Just remember, these tools are available to make your life easy and tidy.