Fossil (software)

Original author(s)	D. Richard Hipp
Initial release	2006; 19 years ago
Stable release	2.26 / 30 April 2025; 8 days ago
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; 2007: GPL-2.0-only
Website	www.fossil-scm.org

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

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 documentation.^[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])