A few days ago I was working on a PHP project. I did the usual edit, upload and refresh to see my changes. But instead of seeing the results of my new code I see a “undefined function” error. That’s odd I thought. So, I check my text editor to see that I was in the right folder and I was. I check my ftp client to be sure I uploaded to the right directory and I did. Humm???
What happened?
File version conflict is what happened.
It all started while I was working on the project at home one night and made a few changes to the code. Then a few days later I got some time to work on my project again so I plugged in my portable drive and went to work. This is all good except one important thing I forgot about. My home PC and my portable drive were not in sync. So the latest version of the project was located on the FTP server and my home PC and not in my portable drive. Well the damage wasn’t too bad and I was able to recover my changes when I got home but what if I had been hacking several files and uploaded them?
I vowed, like countless other before me, that I will never let this happen again and will from this day forth use source control for every single file I touch!! Or at least the ones that pay the bills.
Thus began my hunt for a version control system that I could access form anywhere anytime. Specifically I want Subversion.
This gave me 3 Options:
1) Upgrade my hosting package or switch to a hosting company that offers Subversion
2) Set up a Subversion server on one of my personal PC’s and then put it on the internet
3) Find a company that offers Subversion hosting
Forget #1 - my hosting is dirt cheap and I’m way to lazy to move all of my projects.
Forget #2 - even though my internet connection is fast and I’ve got a spare PC, I’ve got a 3 year old that loves getting into the office and pressing the big bright blue power button on the PC.
Which left me with option #3 which has 2 paths: free and not free. I like free.
But what do you get for free these days?
One free option was to use http://code.google.com to create a project and get SVN, File Management, a Wiki, and Issue Tracking but the catch is that the project becomes Open Source for the whole world. Which is fine if your working on an OSS project but if your an independent contractor or a small start-up OSS may not be part of the plan.
Which brings me to Unfuddle who provide Source Control with Bug and Issue Tracking. They offer 5 levels of service from Free to Enterprise for $99/mo.
With the FREE plan you get :
- 15MB of Total Storage
- Maximum of 1 User
- Messages
- Milestones
- Issue Management
- Source Control with Subversion
Another bonus is that you get your own sub-domain with the free plan like: http://diceroller.unfuddled.com.
The Messages and Milestones features at first seem useless for 1 user but it does create a place for you to store and track information for your sanity’s sake.
But the reason I’m so excited about this is that I now have access to my own private Subversion code repository.
Now all I need to do is be very adamant about using it and I shouldn’t run into any source version problems again.
So if you’re a start-up, an independent developer of you would like to have a testing playground to lear how to use Subversion then
Unfuddle my be your answer.