What Is It?
Fossil is a simple, high-reliability, distributed
SCM
system with these advanced features:
- Project Management —
In addition to doing distributed version control
like Git and Mercurial,
Fossil also supports bug tracking,
wiki, forum,
email alerts, chat, and
technotes.
- Built-in Web Interface —
Fossil has a built-in, themeable, extensible,
and intuitive web interface
with a rich variety of information pages
(examples) promoting situational awareness.
This entire website is just a running instance of Fossil.
The pages you see here are all wiki or
embedded documentation or (in the case of
the download page)
unversioned files.
When you clone Fossil from one of its
self-hosting repositories,
you get more than just source code — you get this entire website.
- All-in-one —
Fossil is a single self-contained, stand-alone executable.
To install, simply download a
precompiled binary
for Linux, Mac, or Windows and put it on your $PATH.
Easy-to-compile source code is also available.
- Self-host Friendly — Stand up a project website
in minutes using a variety of techniques.
Fossil is CPU and memory efficient. Most projects can be
hosted comfortably on a 5ドル/month VPS or a Raspberry Pi.
You can also set up an automatic
GitHub mirror.
- Simple Networking —
Fossil uses ordinary HTTPS (or SSH if you prefer)
for network communications, so it works fine from behind
firewalls and proxies.
The protocol is
bandwidth efficient to the point that Fossil can be
used comfortably over dial-up, weak 3G, or airliner Wifi.
- Autosync —
Fossil supports "autosync" mode
which helps to keep projects moving
forward by reducing the amount of needless
forking and merging often
associated with distributed projects.
- Robust & Reliable —
Fossil stores content using an enduring file format
in an SQLite database so that transactions are
atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash.
Automatic self-checks verify that all aspects of
the repository are consistent prior to each commit.
- Free and Open-Source — 2-clause BSD license.
Latest Release: 2.27 (2025年09月30日)
Quick Start
- Download or install using a package manager or
compile from sources.
- fossil init REPOSITORY-DIR/new-repository
- fossil open REPOSITORY-DIR/new-repository
- fossil add files-or-directories
- fossil commit -m "commit message"
- fossil ui
- Repeat steps 4, 5, and 6, in any order, as necessary.
See the Quick Start Guide for more detail.