Quick Start

(see also [:UnderstandingMercurial] and [:Tutorial] and [:QuickStart])

TableOfContents

1. Setting a username

By default Mercurial uses a username of the form 'user@localhost' for commits. This is often meaningless. It's best to configure a proper email address in ~/.hgrc (or on a Windows system in %USERPROFILE%\Mercurial.ini) by adding lines such as the following:

[ui]
username = John Doe <john@example.com>

2. Working on an existing Mercurial project

If you have a URL to a browsable project [:Repository:repository] (for example [http://selenic.com/hg]), you can grab a copy like so:

$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg mercurial-repo
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 6623 changesets with 12734 changes to 911 files
updating working directory
796 files updated, 0 files merged, 0 files removed, 0 files unresolved

This will create a new directory called mercurial-repo, grab the complete project history, and [:Update:check out] the [:Tip:tip]most [:ChangeSet:changeset] (see also ["Clone"]).

3. Setting up a new Mercurial project

You'll want to start by creating a repository:

$ cd project/
$ hg init           # creates .hg

Mercurial will look for a file named [".hgignore"] in the root of your repository which contains a set of glob patterns and regular expressions to ignore in file paths. Here's an example .hgignore file:

syntax: glob
*.orig
*.rej
*~
*.o
tests/*.err

syntax: regexp
.*\#.*\#$

Test your .hgignore file with:

$ hg status         # show all non-ignored files

This will list all files that are not ignored with a '?' flag (not tracked). Edit your .hgignore file until only files you want to track are listed by status. You'll want to track your .hgignore file too! But you'll probably not want to track files generated by your build process. Once you're satisfied, schedule your files to be added, then [:Commit:commit]:

$ hg add            # add those 'unknown' files
$ hg commit         # commit all changes, edit changelog entry

4. Clone, Commit, Merge

$ hg clone project project-work    # clone repository
$ cd project-work
$ <make changes>
$ hg commit
$ cd ../project
$ hg pull ../project-work   # pull changesets from project-work
$ hg merge                  # merge the new tip from project-work into our working directory
$ hg commit                 # commit the result of the merge

See also: [:Clone], [:Commit], [:Pull], [:Merge]

5. Exporting a patch

(make changes)
$ hg commit
$ hg export tip    # export the most recent commit

See also: [:Export]

6. Network support

# clone from the primary Mercurial repo
foo$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg/
foo$ cd hg

# update an existing repo
foo$ hg pull http://selenic.com/hg/

# export your current repo via HTTP with browsable interface
foo$ hg serve -n "My repo" -p 80

# push changes to a remote repo with SSH
foo$ hg push ssh://user@example.com/hg/

See also: [:Serve], [:Push], [:Pull]

translations: [:QuickStartDe:german] [:QuickStartPtBr:portuguese]