In software development, distributed version control (also known as distributed revision control) is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer. Compared to centralized version control, this enables automatic management branching and merging, speeds up most operations (except pushing and fetching), improves the ability to work offline, and does not rely on a single location for backups. Git, the world's most popular version control system, is a distributed version control system.

Distributed version control systems (DVCS) use a peer-to-peer approach to version control, as opposed to the client–server approach of centralized systems. Distributed revision control synchronizes repositories by transferring patches from peer to peer. There is no single central version of the codebase; instead, each user has a working copy and the full change history.

Advantages of DVCS (compared with centralized systems) include:

Disadvantages of DVCS (compared with centralized systems) include:

Some originally centralized systems now offer some distributed features. Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team Services now host centralized and distributed version control repositories via hosting Git.

Similarly, some distributed systems now offer features that mitigate the issues of checkout times and storage costs, such as the Virtual File System for Git developed by Microsoft to work with very large codebases, which exposes a virtual file system that downloads files to local storage only as they are needed.

A distributed model is generally better suited for large projects with partly independent developers, such as the Linux Kernel. It allows developers to work in independent branches and apply changes that can later be committed, audited and merged (or rejected) by others. This model allows for better flexibility and permits for the creation and adaptation of custom source code branches (forks) whose purpose might differ from the original project. In addition, it permits developers to locally clone an existing code repository and work on such from a local environment where changes are tracked and committed to the local repository allowing for better tracking of changes before being committed to the master branch of the repository. Such an approach enables developers to work in local and disconnected branches, making it more convenient for larger distributed teams.

In a truly distributed project, such as Linux, every contributor maintains their own version of the project, with different contributors hosting their own respective versions and pulling in changes from other users as needed, resulting in a general consensus emerging from multiple different nodes. This also makes the process of "forking" easy, as all that is required is one contributor stop accepting pull requests from other contributors and letting the codebases gradually grow apart.