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 by adding lines such as the following:
[ui] username = Author Name <email@address>
Working on an existing Mercurial project
If you have a URL to a browsable project repository (eg: http://selenic.com/hg), you can grab a copy like so:
$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg
This will create a new directory called hg (by default), grab the complete project history, and check out the tipmost changeset.
Setting up a new Mercurial project
You'll want to start by creating an hg 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 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 'U' flag (unknown). 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:
$ hg add # add those 'unknown' files $ hg commit # commit all changes, edit changelog entry
Branching and merging
$ hg clone linux linux-work # create a new branch
$ cd linux-work
$ <make changes>
$ hg commit
$ cd ../linux
$ hg pull ../linux-work # pull changesets from linux-work
$ hg merge # merge the new tip from linux-work into
# (old versions used "hg update -m" instead)
# our working directory
$ hg commit # commit the result of the merge
Importing patches
Fast:
$ patch < ../p/foo.patch $ hg addremove # add and remove files added/removed by the patch $ hg commit
Faster:
$ patch < ../p/foo.patch $ hg commit `lsdiff -p1 ../p/foo.patch`
Fastest:
$ cat ../p/patchlist | xargs hg import -p1 -b ../p
Exporting a patch
(make changes) $ hg commit $ hg tip 28237:747a537bd090880c29eae861df4d81b245aa0190 $ hg export 28237 > foo.patch # export changeset 28237
Network support
# pull from the primary Mercurial repo foo$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg/ foo$ cd hg # export your current repo via HTTP with browsable interface foo$ hg serve -n "My repo" -p 80 # pushing changes to a remote repo with SSH foo$ hg push ssh://user@example.com/~/hg/ # merge changes from a remote machine bar$ hg pull http://foo/ bar$ hg merge # merge changes into your working directory # Set up a CGI server on your webserver foo$ cp hgwebdir.cgi ~/public_html/hg/index.cgi foo$ emacs ~/public_html/hg/index.cgi # adjust the defaults