Fossil: A Coherent Software Configuration Management System
What Is It?
Download
Quick Start
Install
Support/Forum
Tips & Hints
Change Log
License
User Links
Hacker How-To
Fossil vs. Git
Doc Index
Fossil is a simple, high-reliability, distributed<br>SCM<br>system with these advanced features:
Project Management —<br>In addition to doing distributed version control<br>like Git and Mercurial,<br>Fossil also supports bug tracking,<br>wiki, forum,<br>email alerts, chat, and<br>technotes.
Built-in Web Interface —<br>Fossil has a built-in, themeable, extensible,<br>and intuitive web interface<br>with a rich variety of information pages<br>(examples) promoting situational awareness.
This entire website is just a running instance of Fossil.<br>The pages you see here are all wiki or<br>embedded documentation or (in the case of<br>the download page)<br>unversioned files.<br>When you clone Fossil from one of its<br>self-hosting repositories,<br>you get more than just source code — you get this entire website.
All-in-one —<br>Fossil is a single self-contained, stand-alone executable.<br>To install, simply download a<br>precompiled binary<br>for Linux, Mac, or Windows and put it on your $PATH.<br>Easy-to-compile source code is also available.
Self-host Friendly — Stand up a project website<br>in minutes using a variety of techniques.<br>Fossil is CPU and memory efficient. Most projects can be<br>hosted comfortably on a $5/month VPS or a Raspberry Pi.<br>You can also set up an automatic<br>GitHub mirror.
Simple Networking —<br>Fossil uses ordinary HTTPS (or SSH if you prefer)<br>for network communications, so it works fine from behind<br>firewalls and proxies.<br>The protocol is<br>bandwidth efficient to the point that Fossil can be<br>used comfortably over dial-up, weak 3G, or airliner Wifi.
Autosync —<br>Fossil supports "autosync" mode<br>which helps to keep projects moving<br>forward by reducing the amount of needless<br>forking and merging often<br>associated with distributed projects.
Robust & Reliable —<br>Fossil stores content using an enduring file format<br>in an SQLite database so that transactions are<br>atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash.<br>Automatic self-checks verify that all aspects of<br>the repository are consistent prior to each commit.
Free and Open-Source — 2-clause BSD license.
Latest Release: 2.28 (2026-03-11)
Download
Change Summary
Check-ins in version 2.28
Check-ins derived from the 2.28 release
Timeline of all past releases
Quick Start
Download or install using a package manager or<br>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.<br>See the Quick Start Guide for more detail.