What is version control?
The class of systems that assists software developers in tracking and managing changes in computer programs, websites, documents, or other data is known as version control. Developers continually make improvements and modifications to the code of a software after creating it. With each update, they come up with a new version of the initial officially released code of the software.
The role of version control systems is to maintain these version updates by storing the changes in a central repository, which is a location where all the files for a specific project are stored. This process makes it easier to collaborate on the versions. They can download versions from the repository, make changes to them, and re-upload the new version they've created. To keep track, these changes stored in the repository can be viewed by other developers at any time.
What is "Git"?
As the name suggests, Git is the version control system upon which GitHub is based. Git is an open-source system created by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, in 2005. (At that time, it started as a command-line tool in the Linux kernel.)
Git is more specifically a distributed version control system. It manages software versions much like other version control systems, using a central repository. The difference is that Git, as a distributed system, makes the repository available on every user's computer. This means that users employing distributed version control essentially maintain a copy of the central repository by cloning it to their own machine.
- This system operates in a way that allows users to first make changes to their own local copies and then record these changes on the central server.
- This process makes it easier to work with more detailed modifications, as each time a user wants to make a change, there's no need to establish a connection to the server to do so.
What is the GitLab on premises environment?
In order to unify Deltares source code management, it has been decided that for projects where Deltares is leading, cloud-based GitHub Enterprise is the first choice. However there are projects for large stakeholders with sufficient means to request a custom solution that require that all data is stored on European servers. For these projects Deltares provides a GitLab on premises solution. All data will be stored on servers located at Deltares.
The Gitlab instance that can be accessed through the following URL: https://git.deltares.nl
If you wish to request a repository on Gitlab and your project meets the requirements, please send an e-mail to discuss your case: github.support@deltares.nl
