Tell me more ×
Programmers Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional programmers interested in conceptual questions about software development. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 6 down vote favorite
2

I'm getting into freelance web design and I have a team of several people. I was wondering what is the best tool (preferably free) to share code with other members of the team, allow them to edit it etc. A way for us all to work fluidly.

share|improve this question
If you and your team are co-located, just set up a local VCS repository (git, Mercurial, whatever). It gets a bit more complicated if you need access from internet. In that case, I would recommend just paying for the service. For instance GitHub is just great, and IMO, really not that expensive if you are doing professional development. – merryprankster Jul 27 '11 at 6:54

4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote

You should be looking at sharing code via a version control system. Private Mercurial repositories can be hosted for free at Bitbucket, or Git repositories can be hosted at Github.

Alternatively, you can set up your own server for hosting repositories, and everyone can access them from there.

share|improve this answer
Alright that's what I was wondering thank you! Github seems much more popular at least from my understanding. Unfortunately you have to pay for private repositories I believe. And bitbucket says it offers private for free so that's where I'll go. – Emil Maes Jul 27 '11 at 6:38
Just tried out all this Mercurial stuff! My god am I confused. This is proving very difficult. I've installed so many programs, watched so many videos. This is very frustrating. Any good tutorials for Mercurial and bitbucket? The documentation is useless... – Emil Maes Jul 27 '11 at 7:48
@Emil Maes: hginit.com might help you out. If you're on a Windows system, you might also find things like TortoiseHg help you out tremendously. – sevenseacat Jul 27 '11 at 9:06
up vote 1 down vote

Any distributed version control system should work well, but I'm familiar with Mercurial so let's go with that.

If people in your team prefer using a GUI over the command line, I recommend TortoiseHg, which installs Mercurial for you. Otherwise, install Mercurial yourself.

This tutorial is a good place to learn about Mercurial. It uses the command line, but people who plan on using TortoiseHg should read it too. It explains the concepts behind distributed version control, which I think is more important than learning any particular tool such as Git or Mercurial.

If your team has 5 or less members, then you can host an unlimited amount of private repositories at bitbucket for free. If the team is larger, you can pay for more users, find another free host, or host your own repositories, which isn't too difficult.

share|improve this answer
up vote 0 down vote

For javascript etc related http://jsfiddle.net/ this is by far the best tool! And http://pastebin.com/ for simple code exchanging :)

share|improve this answer
We will be using HTML, CSS, JS (jQuery), and PHP. I was thinking something where all the members have accounts, login, can view/download the code, add to it etc. Pastebin is great for what it is but not what I'm looking for sorry. – Emil Maes Jul 27 '11 at 6:35
Understandable. This is a good question, I'll keep my eyes on it. – Kalle H. Väravas Jul 27 '11 at 6:41
up vote 0 down vote

If versioning control is too complicated for your team, you might want to consider DropBox?

This allows multiple computers to share a common set of files. Any update will be mirrored out to all participating computers, and - opposed to a shared network drive - you have a local copy.

Note: Make regular local backups. DropBox is not a replacement for versioning control.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.