Codebase

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Codebase" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In software development, a codebase (or code base) is a collection of source code used to build a particular software system, application, or software component. Typically, a codebase includes only human-written source code system files; thus, a codebase usually does not include source code files generated by tools (generated files) or binary library files (object files), as they can be built from the human-written source code. However, it generally does include configuration and property files, as they are the data necessary for the build.

A codebase is typically stored in a source control repository in a version control system. A source code repository is a place where large amounts of source code are kept, either publicly or privately. Source code repositories are used most basically for backups and versioning, and on multi-developer projects to handle various source code versions and to provide aid in resolving conflicts that arise from developers submitting overlapping modifications.

Subversion, Git and Mercurial are examples of popular tools used to handle this workflow, which are common in open source projects.

For smaller projects, its code may be kept as a non-managed set of files (even the Linux kernel was maintained as a set of files for many years).^[1]