Bookmarks Extension

This extension is distributed with Mercurial.

Author: DavidSoria

Additional information, also for people coming from Git: bookmarks extension explained

Overview

Bookmarks are markers on commits that move when new commits are made. Therefore you can do a hg bookmark newfeature and work on that and the bookmark will move forward with every commit you do.

Bookmarks can be used to access the commit whenever a usual lookup is allowed, therefore you can merge and update bookmarks by their names.

Bookmarks are stored localy. You can use rsync or scp to copy the .hg/bookmarks file to a remote repository. You can also use hg id -r <bookmark> <repourl> to get the id of a bookmark (and therefore might manually track it).

An example usage:

$ hg bookmark ds/feature-x
.. hack .. hack ..
$ hg commit
.. hack .. hack ..
$ hg commit
$ hg update 4
# go back to old rev
$ hg merge ds/feature-x

Configuration

Configure your .hgrc to enable the extension by adding following lines:

[extensions]
bookmarks =

By default, when several bookmarks point to the same changeset, they will all move forward together. It is possible to obtain a more Git-like experience by adding the following configuration option to your .hgrc

[bookmarks]
track.current = True

This will cause Mercurial to track the bookmark that you are currently using, and only update it. This is similar to Git's approach to branching.

Usage

Let’s give you a short example how bookmarks work.

Now let’s go into a Mercurial repository. You can run hg help bookmarks to show the available flags. Let’s start with a basic listing of available bookmarks:

 $ hg bookmarks
 no bookmarks set

Create a bookmark on the current tip of the repository:

 $ hg bookmark my-tip
 $ hg bookmarks
   * my-tip                    7348:1a5c9ca2bfd5

Let’s create a bookmark on another revision in the history:

 $ hg bookmark -r 7300 hgweb-fix
 $ hg bookmarks
   * my-tip                  7348:1a5c9ca2bfd5
     hgweb-fix               7300:591767e6ea7a

We can then update to the revision:

 $ hg update hgweb-fix
 82 files updated, 0 files merged, 31 files removed, 0 files unresolved
 $ hg bookmarks
      my-tip                  7348:1a5c9ca2bfd5
   *  hgweb-fix               7300:591767e6ea7a

We also can now commit to this bookmark and create a new head:

 ...hack..hack..
 $ hg commit -m’Another hgweb bugfix’
 $ hg bookmarks
      my-tip                  7348:1a5c9ca2bfd5
   *  hgweb-fix               7349:ca3fbad32554

Let’s go back to our tip and merge our change into it:

 $ hg update -C my-tip
 $ hg merge hgweb-fix
 $ hg commit -m’Merge bookmark hgweb-fix’

Now we can just delete our bookmarks:

 $ hg bookmark -d hgweb-fix
 $ hg bookmarks
   * my-tip                  7350:3acda44343da

Delete the changeset as well (requires mq extension):

hg tag -r hgweb-fix hgweb-fix-tag
hg bookmark -d hgweb-fix
hg strip hgweb-fix-tag

You can use bookmarks in every rev lookup. This means you can also do hg log -prf my-tip:0 or hg qimport -r my-tip. It is even possible to look them up using hg id -r.

Working With Remote Repositories

Bookmarks in remote repositories are "visible" as identifier for pull, for instance with hg pull -r web-fix.

Starting with Mercurial 1.6, bookmarks can also be pushed and pulled between repositories. This naturally requires the bookmark extension to be enabled on both sides.

By default bookmarks that are already present on both the client and server are updated on the client on pull and updated on the server on push.

To start sharing a bookmark present on a server, use hg pull -B bookmark and the bookmark along with the relevant changesets will be pulled to the client.

To publish a local bookmark to a server, use hg push -B bookmark and the bookmark along with the relevant changesets will be pushed to the server. To delete a bookmark from a server, delete it locally first, then use push -B on the deleted name.

To check which bookmarks exist on the remote repository but not locally use hg incoming -B. Use hg outgoing -B to check which bookmarks exists locally but not yet on the remote repository.

/!\ Be aware that there is only one namespace for bookmarks - it is advised to prefix your local-only bookmarks to avoid conflicts with other users.


CategoryBundledExtension