Fossil
A Coherent Software Configuration Management System
What Is It?



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 Quick Start
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 Tips & Hints
 Change Log
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 Hacker How-To
 Fossil vs. Git
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Fossil is a simple, high-reliability, distributed
SCM
system with these advanced features:

Project Management —
      In addition to doing distributed version control
      like Git and Mercurial,
      Fossil also supports bug tracking,
      wiki, forum,
      email alerts, chat, and
      technotes.

Built-in Web Interface —
      Fossil has a built-in, themeable, extensible,
      and intuitive web interface
      with a rich variety of information pages
      (examples) promoting situational awareness.
      
      This entire website is just a running instance of Fossil.
      The pages you see here are all wiki or
      embedded documentation or (in the case of
      the download page)
      unversioned files.
      When you clone Fossil from one of its
      self-hosting repositories,
      you get more than just source code — you get this entire website.

All-in-one —
      Fossil is a single self-contained, stand-alone executable.
      To install, simply download a
      precompiled binary
      for Linux, Mac, or Windows and put it on your $PATH.
      Easy-to-compile source code is also available.

Self-host Friendly — Stand up a project website
      in minutes using a variety of techniques.
      Fossil is CPU and memory efficient. Most projects can be
      hosted comfortably on a $5/month VPS or a Raspberry Pi.
      You can also set up an automatic
      GitHub mirror.

Simple Networking —
      Fossil uses ordinary HTTPS (or SSH if you prefer)
      for network communications, so it works fine from behind
      firewalls and proxies.
      The protocol is
      bandwidth efficient to the point that Fossil can be
      used comfortably over dial-up, weak 3G, or airliner Wifi.

Autosync —
      Fossil supports "autosync" mode
      which helps to keep projects moving
      forward by reducing the amount of needless
      forking and merging often
      associated with distributed projects.

Robust & Reliable —
      Fossil stores content using an enduring file format
      in an SQLite database so that transactions are
      atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash.
      Automatic self-checks verify that all aspects of
      the repository are consistent prior to each commit.

Free and Open-Source — 2-clause BSD license.


Latest Release: 2.25 (2024-11-06)

Download
Change Summary
Check-ins in version 2.25
Check-ins derived from the 2.25 release
Timeline of all past releases


Quick Start

Download or install using a package manager or
      compile from sources.
fossil init REPOSITORY-DIR/new-repository
fossil open REPOSITORY-DIR/new-repository
fossil add files-or-directories
fossil commit -m "commit message"
fossil ui
Repeat steps 4, 5, and 6, in any order, as necessary.
      See the Quick Start Guide for more detail.



