Category: version management

Fossil Activity Graph

March 20, 2025 / abhijit

I’ve been a bit envious of the activity graph that Github creates for the checkins happening across all repositories by a developer.

Since I’ve always been using fossil across projects, I thought I could do the same with fossil as well.

Fossil repositories being SQLite databases themselves made things a bit easier.

fossil core dumped error – home directory must be writable

August 23, 2020 / abhijit

I got this fossil error during the latest server setup on Ubuntu. Earlier, it was just the question of adding fossil to the path.

But for some weird reason, I got this error this time –

home directory "" must be writeable
Aborted (core dumped)

After trying to search for the error, I finally got a clue at this fossil check-in, which shows the check for write access to the home directory to create a .fossil file.

Checking all accesses, everything seemed absolutely correct, so the only thing left to do was to create the file manually –

touch ~/.fossil

This solved the problem correctly.

gitignore settings

April 30, 2020 / abhijit

To get git to exclude files and directories, we need to add a .gitignore file in the root folder of the project.

Some of the things I learned from setting up my .gitignore

setting up Fossil on Ubuntu – Part 3

September 30, 2018 / abhijit

Once fossil is set up, I wanted it to start automatically on system reboot, so that I needn’t worry about it in the future.

After trying many different ways of doing this and failing, I ended up with a configuration which included a shell script and supervisor to start it.

setting up Fossil on Ubuntu – Part 2

September 17, 2018 / abhijit

Setting up Nginx with fossil is also not too much of a problem.

Essentially, nginx has to be redirected to the /repos path to be able to work with fossil server command correctly.

setting up Fossil on Ubuntu – Part 1

September 16, 2018 / abhijit

I’ve always been a fan of Fossil which has been my go-to version management system since ages.

I wanted to set up fossil for all the code that I write. Fossil being a single binary file which I can put anywhere (and add that to the path) has always been a breeze to use.