From the course: Learning Git and GitHub

Understanding version control

From the course: Learning Git and GitHub

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Understanding version control

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- [Instructor] There are different types of version control systems you can use besides Git. So let's talk about what they are, and specifically what we call distributed version control. Version control, also called source control, let's you track and manage changes to code over time. This allows you to look at the history of your project over a period of time. And that means that you can back up and restore any part of the project to any previous state of the project's recorded history. There's also a collaboration aspect to using version control. Developers can make changes to the project, allowing an entire team of developers to work together. You can share your code with others so that they can review or comment on what you've done. You can also track who did what and when to a project. There are two types of professional version control architectures: centralized and distributed, the main difference being where the files are stored. Centralized, as the name implies, stores all the files and the history of the files in a centralized server. The changes are tracked on the server, and everyone checks out files from that central location. A version of that is Apache Subversion, or SVN. A distributed version control system allows developers to keep copies of the project on their own workstations. In this system, users make a copy of the project, which is called cloning, into their own machines. This local version of the source code is called the working copy. You can independently make changes to this working copy by committing and modifying the code. When you're ready to update the code on the server, changes are then pushed from the copies to the main repository. You can also pull changes that have been made by others in the main repository onto your own copy.

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