I program a lot. Mostly by myself. Sometimes at the office and sometimes at home. Last week, I suggested you set up Dropbox to store your personal files as you move from home to work. This week, I’ll show my solution to version control on these programming files.

While I do program by myself most of the time, version control keeps me from being an idiot and messing up my projects. It saves versions every time I “check in” my code and allows me to revert to a previous version if something goes wrong. I learned version control with Subversion, so I will be using that here. I know Git and Mercurial are also popular, so you may want to check out those instead.

I downloaded Subversion to both my work computer and personal laptop. This allows me to check in files from Windows Explorer by right-clicking on them. But first, we must set up a repository. Go into your Dropbox folder and create a folder titled “Repo”. Right-click this new folder and click TortoiseSVN->Create Repository Here.

Also in Dropbox, you are going to check out your code twice. Once from your personal computer and once from your work computer. I will explain why we check out two sets of the code in a couple paragraphs. Create a folder in Dropbox called “Repo-Checked out from home” (or work if you’re at work). Right-click on this folder and select SVNCheckout. The URL of your repository will be something like “file:///C:/Users/computerName/Dropbox/Repo”. Do a Fully Recursive checkout from the HEAD revision. Do the same thing at both work and home, adjusting the last word of the folder name accordingly.

This will set up your checked out code folders to have sub-folders “branches”, “tags”, and “trunk”. I’m working by myself, so I store all my code in the “trunk” sub-folder. Create a folder in “trunk” for each project and store your code in there. When you want to check in, right-click on the project folder and select “SVN Commit”. This will send your code to the Repo. When you next change computers, you’ll need to right click on the “Repo-Checked out from home/work” folder of your location and select “SVN Update”. This will update the files in this other repository with your work from the other location. Always update/commit from the correct folder on the correct computer.

I use two repositories like this because I use a development environment (Eclipse) that makes you select your workspace. I select one of the checked out code folders for home and one for work. If I ever lock my computer with Eclipse still running, I cannot select that same folder to be my workspace in Eclipse from another computer. So I can’t have both computers using the same checked out code folder as workspace if I plan on ever leaving Eclipse open when I travel. Having two folders, one for work and one for home, gets around this issue.

I got frustrated by the unreliability of IU’s shared drive in the fall. I also got tired of forgetting files at home or work when I needed them at the other location. So I took the plunge and set up a Dropbox account. I can now store all of my files on Dropbox and not worry about bringing them with me everytime I go home. I downloaded the desktop application to my work computer and personal laptop, which automatically synchs any updates and keeps me from having to go to dropbox.com every time I want to access a file. This works well for personal and homework files; I doubt it would be advisable for anything proprietary or confidential.

Next week, I’ll show how I set up version control in my Dropbox so that I have version control on all my programming files.

If you program in Python on Windows, you know that there are a variety of versions of Python. Version 2.7 is still the standard, but the 3.x versions are probably getting better. You also need to worry about whether you are using 32-bit or 64-bit Python. Whenever you want to install a library, you need to be sure to get the library version that matches your Python version. That’s impossible half the time if you are using the standard package download site, whatever that may be. The developers of the library may or may not offer your version. If they don’t use your version and can’t be troubled with testing all the versions, then they won’t offer it.

The best work-around that I’ve found is a site by Christoph Gohlke. He offers unofficial Windows binaries for Python packages. There, you will typically find the version of the package that matches your Python version. Usually 32-bit and 64-bit options are available for recent releases of Python. Be sure to check there if you ever need a hard-to-find version of a package. It’s way easier than building it yourself.