CVS and the Web

CVS has the ability to reproduce pages as they were in any state or at any time since their creation, as well as the ability to look at a log of all changes to any page and see who made what change when.

For more information on who is using CVS to manage their web content, see our Web Sites Using CVS page.

CVS can be set up to automatically publish a new version of your pages to your web server when you check them in to CVS. The simplest way to do this if your CVS server is on the same machine as your web server is described in the Keeping a Checked out Copy section of the Cederqvist manual. There are also other solutions which accomplish more or less the same thing, described on our Keeping a Checked out Copy Information Page.

This is a somewhat miscellaneous section for various packages which work with CVS and the web (with the emphasis on experimental or obscure packages, or information aimed at people who want to help develop these packages).

The mod_cvs module for the Apache web server allows Apache to fetch pages from CVS as needed

Of course, no mention of CVS and the web would be complete without talking about the Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV) set of web-based protocols.

• How to Set Up and Maintain a Web Site by Lincoln D. Stein, second edition, 1997, is a comprehensive yet concise introduction to all aspects of running a web site. It briefly mentions using CVS to manage web content. The CD-ROM which accompanies the book includes a copy of CVS 1.3-s2.
• There is a nice online introduction to managing web content with CVS, by Sean Dreilinger.
• There is a nice introduction to using CVS for maintaining web content at "Managing Websites Using Unix", Daemon News, Mar 1999.
• There are a variety of packages which allow one to browse or edit version controlled files using nothing but a standard web browser. See for example CVSweb or the jCVS Servlet.