Do You Use SVN Repository for Your Outsourcing Projects?

I wrote about SVN repository on my blog and decided to share it here on HubPages as well. The reason I wrote about SVN repository is the laugh I had a few days back. This guy who is starting a website for his company complained that he has two freelancers developing his site, one doing HTML code and other doing design, and the two of them keep overlapping and can’t seem to manage their work. Now I laughed and laughed, if you are in web developing business or ever had to work with a web developer freelancer you needed to use SVN repository. For those of you who don’t know what an SVN repository or subversion is I will try to explain in plain language, as any other tutorial that you may find on the net will be all technical and you probably won’t understand much at first.

I really want to thank guys from CollabNet who 10 years ago invented subversion, it made my life and the life of thousands of web developers much easier.  So what is an SVN repository and what it’s used for?

As described by Wikipedia: “In software development, Apache Subversion (formerly called Subversion, command name svn (Swedish pronunciation: [svɛn]) ) is a revision control system founded and sponsored in 2000 by CollabNet Inc. Developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly-compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS).”

For more technical readers this will be enough, but for the ones that have no clue what was said here, SVN repository is an open source control system. This is a free system for everyone to use, and it is based on subversion server which you can use by commands or you can use an SVN repository client such as Tortoise SVN, which is in my opinion the best there is. You can use SVN repository to stock up files, keep backup, managed the files and directories of your websites. You can see the modifications made from the moment you created the website up until now, every change is visible. Users can add comments to what changes were made, but that is only for your convenience as all change can be checked and cross referenced with each version of the pages, files and/or documents.

You can use SVN repository to back up the faulty web pages or the code that isn’t working until you get it fixed. Every website needs to have a backup; subversion servers are the best way to have that backup available in a moment. But the biggest reason to use SVN repository is related to the above mentioned trouble a client of mine was having. Your outsourcing workers can each modify the same page at the same time and when they upload it to the SVN repository if the code they changed doesn’t overlap it will be automatically combined into a working code. You see the beauty of SVN repository now? If by some chance the work of the two web developers does overlap, the SVN repository will mark the code that overlaps and it will be an easy thing to fix in a few minutes.

I mean what is the frustration when you do something to an HTML file and uploaded it to the server only to find out that you have overwritten the change your fellow web developer uploaded there a few minutes ago, you will be destroying each others work! That is a thing of the past when you use SVN repository, this little free open source control system has made life of thousands and thousands of web developers much easier, including mine. So if you have a web project and you need to outsource to several web developers at a time or just want to make sure that everything is ok and the changes made were to your liking and to have backup at all times, you should always use SVN repository control systems.

You can find the subversion server at CollabNet and I also recommend downloading Tortoise SVN client. These are free programs that will make your life much easier.