Fossil (software)

Not to be confused with FOSSIL or Fossil (file system).

Fossil is a software configuration management, bug tracking system and wiki software server for use in software development created by D. Richard Hipp.

Original author(s)	D. Richard Hipp
Initial release	2006; 19 years ago (2006)
Stable release	2.25[1]  / 6 November 2024; 5 months ago (6 November 2024)
Repository	fossil-scm.org/home
Written in	C, SQL
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Software configuration management, bug tracking system, wiki software
License	2010: BSD-2-Clause[a][2] 2007: GPL-2.0-only[b]
Website	www.fossil-scm.org

Features

The Fossil web interface showing changes to the SQLite source tree

Fossil is a cross-platform distributed version control system that runs on Linux, BSD derivatives, Mac and Windows. It is capable of performing distributed version control, bug tracking, wiki services, and blogging.^[3][4]

The software has a built-in web interface, which reduces project tracking complexity and promotes situational awareness. A user may simply type "fossil ui" from within any check-out and Fossil automatically opens the user's web browser to display a page giving detailed history and status information on that project. The fossil executable may be run as a standalone HTTP server, as a CGI application, accessed via SSH, or run interactively from the CLI.^[5]

To simplify centralized development, Fossil provides an "autosync" mode to automatically sync changes when commits are made, in a similar manner to centralized version control systems.^[4][6]

Content is stored using a SQLite database so that transactions are atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash.^[7]

Fossil is free software released under a BSD license (relicensed from previously GPL).^[8]

Adoption

Fossil is used for version control by the SQLite project, which is itself a component of Fossil. SQLite transitioned to using Fossil for version control over CVS on 2009-08-12.^[9][10]

Some examples of other projects using Fossil are:

• Tcl/Tk Project
• Pikchr
• MySQL++, a C++ wrapper for the MySQL and MariaDB C APIs
• LuaSQLite3
• libfossil
• fnc, the ncurses-based Fossil UI experience in the terminal
• Androwish, the Tcl implementation for Android
• ObjFW, a cross-platform Objective-C runtime and framework

Source code hosting

The following websites provide free source code hosting for Fossil repositories:

• Chisel. Original site owner James Turner announced that the site would cease operation on May 1, 2013.^[11] After domain ownership was transferred on May 1, 2013, it continued operation.^[12]
• SourceForge (unofficially through webpages hosting service^[13])

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• Comparison of revision control software
• List of revision control software

Notes

1. BSD-2-Clause since 2010-05-16.
2. GPL-2.0-only from 2007-07-21 until 2010-05-16.