usourcecontrol

1.2What USourceControl is

Four pieces — a dashboard, a desktop app, a build runner, and a local agent — and which one you actually spend your day in.

Section 2 of 5 in this chapter

USourceControl is a cloud source control service for Unreal Engine 5 teams. There is no server for you to run. You install one application, point it at the folder your .uproject lives in, and that is the whole setup.

Underneath, it is four pieces. Knowing which is which will make the rest of this book easier to follow, because almost every chapter is about one of them.

        YOUR MACHINE                          USOURCECONTROL
  ┌────────────────────────────┐        ┌───────────────────────────┐
  │  Unreal Editor             │        │  Web dashboard            │
  │         │                  │        │  projects · people · keys │
  │         ▼          commits │        │  history · builds · plans │
  │  Desktop app  ────────────────────► │                           │
  │         ▲            pulls │        │  file versions · locks    │
  │         │                  │ ◄───── │  tasks · releases         │
  │  Local agent (localhost)   │        └───────────────────────────┘
  └────────────────────────────┘                      ▲
             ▲                                        │ claims work,
             │ status · checkout · check-in           │ uploads builds
             │                                        │
     editor tooling                            ┌──────────────┐
     coding agents                             │ Forge runner │
                                               │ (a machine   │
                                               │  you own)    │
                                               └──────────────┘
Figure 1-2. The four pieces, and what talks to what.

The web dashboard

This is the administrative half. Organizations, projects, members and their roles, project keys, billing, the browsable commit history, the task board, and the build queue all live here. You will visit it when you set something up and rarely in between.

The desktop app

This is where the work happens. It watches your project folder, tells you what changed and what your teammates pushed, takes and releases locks, commits, pulls, and — as of the Releases view — packages your game and uploads it to a store. Chapters 2 and 4 are almost entirely about this app.

USourceControl Forge

A separate application for a machine you dedicate to building. It claims work, materializes the exact committed state of a project, runs Unreal's own packaging toolchain, and publishes the result. It is optional, it is on every plan, and it is chapter 5.

The local agent

A small HTTP API that the desktop app serves on localhost while it runs. It is how tooling on the same machine — an editor plugin, a coding agent, a script — asks the app to do things without holding any credentials of its own. Most people never touch it directly; see section 8.3 if you want to.

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