Tutorial - getting started: installation

Installing ["Mercurial"] is straightforward.

Once you're done, come back here.

Note: This tutorial assumes you are running a version of ["Mercurial"] later than 0.6. In other words, if you have the 0.6 release, the tutorial will not work for you. This tutorial was last updated for ["Mercurial"] 0.9.1.

The ["Mercurial"] program is named hg. Every ["Mercurial"] command starts with hg, followed by the command name, followed by any relevant options and arguments.

Now that ["Mercurial"] is installed, we should be able to simply type hg at the prompt, and the program should display some helpful command summaries:

$ hg
Mercurial Distributed SCM

basic commands (use "hg help" for the full list or option "-v" for details):

 add        add the specified files on the next commit
 annotate   show changeset information per file line
 clone      make a copy of an existing repository
(...)

If this is not the case, there is something wrong with your installation, and you should take a look at InstallTroubleshooting.

To determine what version of Mercurial we are running, let's type:

$ hg version
Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 0.7)

Copyright (C) 2005 Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

If all has gone well, let's continue on to TutorialClone.