Fossil (software)

Last updated
Original author(s) D. Richard Hipp
Initial release2006;19 years ago (2006)
Stable release
2.26 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 30 April 2025;2 months ago (30 April 2025)
Repository
Written in C, SQL
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Software configuration management, bug tracking system, wiki software
License 2010: BSD-2-Clause [a] [2]
2007: GPL-2.0-only [b]
Website www.fossil-scm.org   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Fossil is a software configuration management, bug tracking system and wiki software server for use in software development created by D. Richard Hipp.

Contents

Features

The Fossil web interface showing changes to the SQLite source tree Fossil-web-timeline.png
The Fossil web interface showing changes to the SQLite source tree

Fossil is a cross-platform distributed version control system that runs on Linux, BSD derivatives, Mac and Windows. It is capable of performing distributed version control, bug tracking, wiki services, and documentation. [3] [4]

The software has a built-in web interface, which reduces project tracking complexity and promotes situational awareness. A user may simply type "fossil ui" from within any check-out and Fossil automatically opens the user's web browser to display a page giving detailed history and status information on that project. The fossil executable may be run as a standalone HTTP server, as a CGI application, accessed via SSH, or run interactively from the CLI. [5]

To simplify centralized development, Fossil provides an "autosync" mode to automatically sync changes when commits are made, in a similar manner to centralized version control systems. [4] [6]

Content is stored using a SQLite database so that transactions are atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash. [7]

Fossil is free software released under a BSD license (relicensed from previously GPL). [8]

Adoption

Fossil is used for version control by the SQLite project, which is itself a component of Fossil. SQLite transitioned to using Fossil for version control over CVS on 2009-08-12. [9] [10]

Some examples of other projects using Fossil are:

Source code hosting

The following websites provide free source code hosting for Fossil repositories:

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ BSD-2-Clause since 2010-05-16.
  2. ↑ GPL-2.0-only from 2007-07-21 until 2010-05-16.

References

  1. ↑ "Changes for version 2.26".
  2. ↑ Fossil Copyright
  3. ↑ "Fossil: A Coherent Software Configuration Management System". www.fossil-scm.org. Retrieved 2025-04-21.
  4. 1 2 Edge, Jake (March 16, 2011). "Version control with Fossil". lwn.net. Archived from the original on 2024-01-16. Retrieved 2025-04-22.
  5. ↑ "Fossil: The Fossil Web Interface". www.fossil-scm.org. Retrieved 2025-04-21.
  6. ↑ "Fossil: Fossil Concepts: Workflow". www.fossil-scm.org. Retrieved 2025-04-22.
  7. ↑ "Integrated version control with Fossil SCM". 5 November 2009., DLR Tech Talk presentation by Arne Bachmann, 2009-12-01
  8. ↑ "Fossil DSCM Relicensed with BSD License". 2010-05-16.
  9. ↑ "Fossil: Fossil Performance". Fossil-scm.org. 2009-08-23. Retrieved 2009-09-12.
  10. ↑ "SQLite: Timeline". sqlite.org.
  11. ↑ "Chiselapp.com shutting down". James Turner. 2013-03-28. Retrieved 2013-04-10.
  12. ↑ "ChiselApp ChangeOver Complete". Andreas Kupries. 2013-04-30. Retrieved 2013-05-01.
  13. ↑ "Example: Free Fossil-SCM Repository Hosting" . Retrieved 2015-11-21.

Further reading

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