Version control for PHP Development [closed]

Question

I have been hearing a lot about the advantages of using a version control system and would like to try one. I was doing freelance web development in PHP for the past 2 years, two months back I hired two more programmer to help me. I will be hiring one more person soon. We maintain 4 websites, all of which are my own, which are continuously being edited by one of us. I learned PHP by myself and have never worked in any other firms. Hence I am new to version control, unit testing and all.

Currently, we have development servers on our workstations. When we edit a particular section of a site, we download the code for that particular section (say /news/ or /movies/ or /wallpapers/ ) from the production server to the dev server, makes the changes locally and uploads to the production server (no code review / testing). Because of this, our dev server is always out of date from our prod server. Occasionally, this also create problem when one of us forgets to download the latest copy from prod and overwrites the last change. I know this is very very foolish, but currently our prod server is the only copy that has all the updates and latest changes.

Can anyone please suggest which is the best version control system for me? I am more interested in distributed version control, since we don't have a central backup for all our code. I read about Mercurial and Git and found that Mercurial is used in several large open source projects by Mozilla, Sun, Symbian etc. So which one do you think is better for me? Not only version control, if there are any other package that I can use to make my current setup better, please mention that too :)

Answer 1

It sounds like Git can accomplish your goals quite well. As it's distributed, it's excellent for working locally since you can perform most operations (commit, revert, diff, patch) without connecting to a central server. You can also avoid that ugly moment of someone pushing new code to production while someone else is working on it, and then having the complicated task of merging those two versions of the code together (git provides a useful tool for doing this called rebase).

You noted there's some big projects using Hg (Mercurial), but there's some pretty big ones using Git, like the Linux Kernel, X.org, Android and Debian.

I use git for all my sites: it's lightning fast, efficient, and easy to use.

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Edit: If you want to get into using Git, I'd recommend doing some reading before jumping right in. Starting off on the wrong foot can have some terrible implications later on. If you follow an Agile Workflow, you might want to check this out. Here's a website I learned most of my Git know-how from.