A version control system is a system or application that keeps track of software code changes during development. Software developers used to keep backups of their code by copying the code into another folder or machine. If the developer or production machine crashed, they could take the code from the backup and run it. However, manually keeping and maintaining backups is troublesome and prone to error, and backup systems are vulnerable to corruption. For this reason, developers began looking for a system or application that could keep their code safe.

Version control is also useful in situations where more than one programmer is working on a project. In the past, programmers had to either work on different files to avoid conflicts or carefully merge the code after some time. Manually merging code is very risky and time-consuming.

In a version control system, every change in a code file is actually a new version of the code. In the software industry, there are many version control systems available, including Git, Subversion, Mercurial, and Perforce. Git, the most popular version control system, was developed by the software developer Linus Torvalds. It is a remarkable application that is now used in almost every software company in the world.