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, but you need to be able to easily deploy your webapp with SVN.

Since it is not always a simple task, so I just point out this article which may be of interest for your project.

General principle:

• Configure Apache on your development server so that it picks up your checked out working copies as separate subdomains. Using this, you can simply make a checkout of your project and it will automagically be up and running. No need to touch the Apache configuration. You need a DNS wildcard entry so that all subdomains of dev.example.org go to your development server.

The only problem with using the above Apache configuration locally is the DNS wildcard. Unless your desktop is assigned a hostname by your network's DNS server and you can set the wildcard there, you will have to make do with your localhost address. You can install dnsmasq to act as a local caching DNS server and put the wildcard on your own machine

• Use dnsmasq so you can achieve the same effect on your own development machine. That way you can develop your web applications locally and you won't need a central development server. In my examples I will be assuming you use subversion for your version control, but it works virtually the same with other version control packages, such as git or bazaar.

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Note: (Humor)
This other question on Subversion allowed me to point out to this article about publishing its (source-controlled) data into production, with in it probably the ugliest diagram I ever saw on the topic ;-)

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.