TutorialClone

Tutorial - cloning a repository

We have followed TutorialInstall to install ["Mercurial"] already, right? Good!

In ["Mercurial"], we do all of our work inside a ["Repository"]. A ["Repository"] is a directory that contains all of the source files that we want to keep history of, along with complete histories of those source files.

The easiest way to get started with ["Mercurial"] is to use a ["Repository"] that already contains some files and some history.

To do this, we use the clone command. This makes a ["Clone"] of a ["Repository"]; it makes a complete copy of another ["Repository"] so that we will have our own local, private one to work in.

Let's clone a small "hello, world" repository hosted at selenic.com:

$ hg clone http://www.selenic.com/repo/hello my-hello

If all goes well, the clone command prints this:

requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 2 changesets with 2 changes to 2 files

We should now find a directory called my-hello in our current directory:

$ ls
my-hello

Inside the my-hello directory, we should find some files:

$ ls my-hello
Makefile  hello.c

These files are exact copies of the files in the ["Repository"] we just ["Clone"]d.

Note: in ["Mercurial"], each ["Repository"] is self-contained. When you ["Clone"] a ["Repository"], the new ["Repository"] becomes an exact copy of the existing one at the time of the ["Clone"], but subsequent changes in either one will not show up in the other unless you explicitly transfer them.

At this point, we can start examining some of the history of our new ["Repository"], by continuing to TutorialHistory.