Free Version Control Tool For Source Code Management

Overview

In real life, multiple developers work on a single project in parallel. Each developer is working on individual tasks or part of a big assignment. It’s very difficult for managing the code and then integrate modifications from all developers. Therefore, we need to have VCS (Version Control System) system to deal with this use case. Version Control System (VCS) is software that allows developers to collaborate and retain a full work history. The Version Control System allows developers to work concurrently and keeps a history of each version. The major types of VCS are: Centralized Version Control and Distributed Version Control System.

Git is a free and open source version control system. It is commonly used for handling project source code in software development. This version control tool helps to store code, track the history of versions, and merge code changes. It can also revert to the previous version of the code when needed. Open source Git’s way of thinking about its data is the big difference between Git and other VCS such as Subversion. Source code management tools other than Git store data as a list of changes and store it as a collection of files. Git version control treats data as a series of filesystem snapshots. It takes a snapshot of all your files and stores a reference to that snapshot.

Git is a powerful distributed version control system that comes with features such as fast, implicit backup, security, branching, and many more. It uses SHA1 (Secure Hash Function) to name and tag objects. It’s very simple to manage branches in Git. Developers can easily create, delete, and merge branches. This version control system has three main states for your files such as Working Directory, Staging Area, and Local Repository. First, the user adds all modifications to the working directory, then adds to the staging area, and finally commits to the repository.