version control systems In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

, a repository is a data structure that stores metadata for a set of files or

directory structure In computing, a directory structure is the way an operating system arranges files that are accessible to the user. Files are typically displayed in a hierarchical tree structure. File names and extensions A filename is a string used to uniquely ...

. Depending on whether the version control system in use is distributed, like

Git Git () is a distributed version control system: tracking changes in any set of files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Its goals include speed, data in ...

Mercurial Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux. Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalability, d ...

, or centralized, like Subversion, CVS, or

Perforce Perforce, legally Perforce Software, Inc., is an American developer of software used for developing and running applications, including version control software, web-based repository management, developer collaboration, application lifecycle man ...

, the whole set of information in the repository may be duplicated on every user's system or may be maintained on a single

server Server may refer to: Computing *Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients Role * Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...

. Some of the metadata that a repository contains includes, among other things, a historical record of changes in the repository, a set of commit objects, and a set of references to commit objects, called ''heads''. The main purpose of a repository is to store a set of files, as well as the history of changes made to those files. Exactly how each version control system handles storing those changes, however, differs greatly. For instance, Subversion in the past relied on a database instance but has since moved to storing its changes directly on the filesystem. These differences in storage techniques have generally led to diverse uses of version control by different groups, depending on their needs.

Overview

In software engineering, a

version control system In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

is used to keep track of versions of a set of files, usually to allow multiple developers to collaborate on a project. The repository keeps track of the files in the project, which is represented as a

graph Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

. A

Distributed version control In software development, distributed version control (also known as distributed revision control) is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer. Compared to centr ...

system is made up of central and branch repositories. A central repository exists on the server. To make changes to it, a developer first works on a branch repository, and proceeds to commit the change to the former.

Forges

A code forge is a web interface to a version control system. A user can commonly browse repositories and their constituent files on the page itself.

Static web hosting

While forges are mainly used to perform version control operations, some forges allow users to host

static web page A static web page (sometimes called a flat page or a stationary page) is a web page that is delivered to the user's web browser exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by a web application. Consequently, a static ...

s by uploading its source code (such as

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

, but not

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

) to a repository. This is usually done in order to provide documentation or a

landing page In online marketing, a landing page, sometimes known as a "lead capture page", "single property page", "static page", "squeeze page" or a "destination page", is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized s ...

for a software project. The use of repositories as a place to upload web documents allows version control to be integrated, and additionally allows quick iteration because changes are pushed through the Version Control System instead of having to upload the file through a protocol like

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and data ...

. Examples of this kind of service include

GitHub Pages GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuou ...

and GitLab Pages.

References

{{Version control software Version control

Overview

Forges

Static web hosting

See also

References