Version Control and Testing for Web Development with RoR

To develop the case studies which are presented in this appendix, we used Ruby on Rails in conjunction with Git for version control, and Test::Unit for testing, both of which helped create an environment very conducive to better development for reasons we will soon be explaining.

Git—Version Control

Git is an open-source and free version control system that was created as an alternative to Subversion, Mercurial, and CVS. A version control system allows you to essentially store all of your code into one central place in the form of snapshots. This means, if you begin working on a part of the application and you realize that you just messed up the entire application, you can easily get the last working code you stored in the version control system and start over on a clean slate.