Will using a VCS help me as a web dev?

Question

I'm thinking of trying a VCS such as subversion, to manage my next project, but I'm not sure if will offer any real benefits for me as a web developer. As I understand it, one of the major benefits of a VCS is that a group of people can work on a project at once.

Reading material on the subject seems pretty one sided:

"Using a version control system is an absolute must for a developer of a project above a few hundred lines of code"

...and I've got a feeling it could become a chore, with not many benefits.

I work on development server on the local network, so any amount of people can work on the files already. If anyone needs to get in remotely, they use FTP. What would a modern version control system give me on top of this?

Answer 1

In your situation it can give you at least four additional benefits:

1) It will serve as additional backup storage.
2) If you accidentally add bugs you can easily return to the previous stable version.
3) If you accidentally add a bug or break something - you can see differences between your current source code and last commited source code - the VCS will show you the differences in a very suitable and demonstrative way - and you will easily find the change that caused the bug or the problem. This one is very useful.
4) You can easily review your modifications before committing. Believe me, you can be surprised :) Sometimes you just do something automatically, not thinking very much, or you can be tired. In this case, if you review your modifications later - you can find mistakes or bad code.

Good luck!

Answer 2

As I see it, VCS systems are even more useful in web environments because of the ease with which "anyone" can edit the site.

Every web project I've ever worked on has suffered from the "too many cooks in the kitchen" syndrome, where eventually someone goes to add one little feature, and then you go back and look and discover that they ended up rewriting some huge chunk of the site and broke something else. Having a stack of versions in a VCS makes troubleshooting those kinds of bugs as close to trivial as you can get.

Also, VCS makes deployment of web apps a breeze. Tag the production version of all the pages in the VCS as such, and then just check out to the web server. So much better than the "traditional" method of one guy with a list of changed files and an FTP client.