Version control is a methodology for managing projects which involves recording the history of changes of each file of the project. These changes are stored and can be viewed or recalled as desired.
To manage a project with version control, you require version control software. At Phoenix Web, we use Git. Other examples include
Version control is hugely useful for web development. Here are some scenarios where version control comes in handy:
If you don’t use version control, your alternatives are to save a file, overwriting all previous changes or to create multiple copies of a file. For example, if you are working on a file called work.doc
x you might save a file as work2.docx
then work3.docx
or maybe you’re a little more organised and you date the file 2016-10-04-work.docx
and then another file 2016-10-03-work.docx
. While you can certainly work this way, it is not ideal.
Read more about version control at Git’s “What is version control” page.