Version control is a wonderful thing. Sadly, not enough companies are implementing it to protect the integrity of their documents, and countless hours are wasted trying to repair the damage that is done.

At my previous place of employment, our department begged management for months to allow us to install Subversion, an open-source source control application. They said ‘no’, the problem being that they didn’t want to give the department root access to our own development server (huh?). As a result, there were on more than one occasion instances where someone would work on something, someone else would work on it (without downloading the newest version) and hilarity, or something the opposite, would ensue. Considering we were operating on razor thin margins, in terms of billable hours for web development - this was a killer.

Of course, I never thought about using version control at home either, since I am only one person and I would doubtlessly NOT overwrite my own files. I mean, how could that ever happen?

A few days ago, I was working on a site, and I made some changes, saved the file (thinking I could undo it if any problems resulted), and saw there were some errors. I flipped back to Eclipse and went to undo but oh no! Eclipse encountered an error, and I lost access to the file. I ended up spending about 30 minutes going back and replacing what I had lost. Billable time wasted, lesson learned.

I had always thought that Subversion required installing an Apache module, so I went to their site to see about how to accomplish this, and I also was planning to look for instructions on completing this task in WAMP. When I found the link to the Windows stand-alone subversion server.. it was like Christmas is July.

Installation was a breeze - I followed the documentation to install the SVN server as a service on windows, create a repository, and I was pretty much set (As a side note - after doing this I discovered that a fellow named Brian Kohrs had created a one click installer, found here).

Now, I installed TortoiseSVN, which is a nice GUI that integrates with the Windows Explorer Shell. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t like to switch programs any more than I have to. As a result, I searched for and discovered Subclipse, which as you may have guessed is a Subversion plugin for Eclipse.

If you already have Eclipse and Subversion installed, you can get Subclipse through the Eclipse installer by putting in the following url: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x.

Once it’s been installed, you can go to Window->Open Perspective->SVN Repository Explorer. Right click anywhere in the window that opens, click on ‘new’ and pick one of the repositories you’ve created (the easiest way to create a new repository is through TortoiseSVN. Go into windows explorer, create a new directory, and ‘right click->Tortoise SVN->Create Repository here’). Then, to put a new project into Subversion, just do ‘new->project->SVN->checkout projects from SVN’ and pick the repository you want. That’s it.

At this point, the only thing you need to remember to do is update the repository regularly - if you don’t you can still lose code. If you are working as part of a team, you can either lock the files you have checked out, or you can allow anyone to edit, and all the changes will be merged when the file is updated to the repository. Either way, adding version control to your applications is sure to save you time at some point. With or without Eclipse, it is now easy to install and easy to use, so there’s really no excuse not to.

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