Question

I have absolutely no idea about version control. Only that it can be very useful in many ways.

I have found a few related questions but none that start from the absolute beginning.

I am the only developer at my work using Mac OS X and traditionally just been using FTP.

Can anyone help me with version control in relation to PHP projects (does it matter)?

Answer 1

Yes, try it out, it’s worth it. And the language you are using doesn’t matter. It’s working great with PHP for me and it will for you too.

Benefits

If you are the only developer, it is indeed easier to go without version control. However, you will find great benefits to using a version control system. Some of the easiest benefits will be:

1. Never wondering what is your latest version once you go back to a project (no more myproject090201-archive2-final6.zip)
2. Never fear to start off some major refactoring, if you make a mistake on your file, you’ll just rollback to the latest version
3. If something stops working in your project and you have the feeling it worked at one point, you can test some of the prior versions easily and look at the difference between the working version and the non-working version to find what broke the code
4. Additional backup of your current project, and even better if it’s not on your machine… of course, additional points for backing up your version control system, we’re never too cautious, you don’t want to have to restart that month-long project do you?

Choices

As some have said, you have a few choices for your version control system and I guess you’ll want a free one to begin. There are a few excellent commercial products but the free ones have nothing to be ashamed of. So here are some very popular free version control systems:

• Subversion (also called SVN)
• Git
• Mercurial
• Bazaar

Centralized versus distributed

Subversion has been there for a while and it’s one classified as ‘centralized’. Meaning everyone will always go fetch the latest version and commit their latest work to one central system, often on another system although it can easily be on your own machine. It’s a process easy to understand.

The three others are called ‘distributed’. There’s a lot of different possible processes as it’s a more flexible system and that’s why those three newcomers are getting a lot of traction these days in open source projects where a lot of people are interacting with one another. Basically you are working with your own revisions on your own machine, making as many copies as you need and deciding which versions you share with other people on other computers.

The trend definitely seems go towards distributed system but as those systems are more recent, they are still missing the GUI tools that makes it really user friendly to use and you might sometimes find the documentation to be a bit lighter. On the other hand, this all seems to be getting corrected quickly.

In your case, as you are working alone, it probably won’t make a big difference, and although you’ll hear very good points for centralized and distributed systems, you’ll be able to work with one or the other without any problems.

Tools

If you absolutely need a GUI tool for your Mac, I’d then choose SVN to get initiated to source control. There are two very good products for that (commercial):

• Versions
• Cornerstone

And a few other ones (such as the free svnX) that are becoming a little bit old and unfriendly in my opinion but that might be interesting trying anyway.

If you don’t mind not using the GUI tools, with the help of Terminal you’ll be able to do all the same things with a few simple command lines with any of the aforementioned systems.

Starting points

In any cases, you’ll want some starting points.

• For Subversion, your first stop must be their free book, Version Control with Subversion. Take a few hours of your day to go through the chapters, it’ll be time well invested. The introduction chapters are a good read even you don’t want to use Subversion specifically because it’ll get you to understand version control a little bit better.

• For a distributed system, I’ve had fun with Mercurial but it’s an easily flammable subject so I’ll let you make your own choice there. But if you end up looking at Mercurial, have a look at this blog post, it was an excellent starter for me that’ll get you up and running with the basics in a few minutes if you’re already a bit accustomed to version control in general. Anyway, drop by Mercurial’s homepage and have a look at the Getting Started section of the page.

Conclusion

Give it a go, invest a day trying it out with a few bogus files. Try out renaming files and directory, erasing, moving things around, committing binary files versus text files, resolving conflicts and reverting to older versions to get a hang of it. These are often the first few hurdles you’ll encounter when playing with version control and it’ll be painless if it’s on a non-production project.

In any cases, it’s something well-worth learning that’ll be helpful with your solo projects as well as if you end up working with other developers at your current job or your next one.

Good luck!