Quick Start

(see also UnderstandingMercurial and ["Tutorial"])

TableOfContents

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 Win system %USERPROFILE%\Mercurial.ini) 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:repository] (for example [http://selenic.com/hg]), you can grab a copy like so:

$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg mercurial-repo

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

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

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]

Exporting a patch

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

See also: [:Export]

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]