What is a Version Control System (VCS)?

Version Control System is software that helps you and your team to keep track of changes in your source code and easily share the changes across the team.

• Whenever you do changes in your source code, you can submit the changes to Version Control System.
• The others can then retrieve your changes from the version control system and integrate them to their source code.
• Similarly you can retrieve changes of the others and integrate them to your source code.

When you submit the changes to version control system (this action is referred to as commit), the version control system creates a snapshot of your source code which is like a copy of the code in the specific point in time. The snapshot is usually called version, revision or hash.

Later on you and the others who have the necessary permissions can see the list of all snapshots together with all changes that happened over time.

When more users use Version Control System, one can see the changes of the others and one person can merge own changes with changes of the others.

This allows safe collaboration within wide team while all the history with all changes is preserved. So if anyone breaks anything, it is never a problem to revert the change and get back to the previous version.