I have a few Ruby on Rails applications I maintain outside of the commercial work I do. These applications are important to me but I have been very bad at keeping them in any source control until today.

I use RailsPlayground with a VPS for my personal hosting and I have been very happy with the hosting and the service in particular. I started looking around for a free or cheap Subversion hosting source and was pleasantly surprised RailsPlayground provides this to their VPS clients.

Pretty decent specs compared to some of the paid-for Subversion hosting plans:

Advanced Subversion and Trac Hosting

In addition to your normal webspace with our hosting plans you will receive a free account on our dedicated SVN and Trac Server with the following features.

* 1 GB Disk Space
* 10 GB Traffic
* Unlimited repositories
* Unlimited users for each repository
* Trac installed automatically via our custom control panel
* Your own Bugzilla instance by request
* Nightly offsite backups
* RAID 1 Data protection
* Secure HTTPS and HTTP access to your svn repositories
* Free with any of our current hosting packages.
* Just send an email to support@railsplayground.com to request access to this service once you have signed up.

I sent an email to support and less than 1/2 hour later I had a new account in their Subversion system and ready to go. I am doing much of my Rails work on a MacBook Pro and Subversion from the command line has not been my favorite way to work. I guess I am used to TortoiseSVN on Windows.

Welcome ZigVersion, a SubVersion client for the Mac from my good buddy Mike Gunderloy over at A Fresh Cup. A quick Twitter chat with Mike and I had the answer I was looking for, a great Subversion client for my Mac. The installation was trivial, as usual on the Mac, and connecting to my SubVersion repository was as well.

I simply added my project files via ZigVersion and checked in...done. The user interface is pretty sharp too.

I am going to use this for my personal projects, since the client is free, but I will also see how well this works over the long-term and may look to buy a license of ZigVersion for commercial work.

I am also looking at using Git since I was lucky enough to score an invite to GitHub but I wanted to get something up fast and I am just get familiar with Git.