Quick Start

(see also UnderstandingMercurial and Tutorial and QuickStart2)

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 ¹ (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 (for example http://selenic.com/hg), you can grab a copy like so:

$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg mercurial-repo
real URL is http://www.selenic.com/hg/
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 9633 changesets with 19124 changes to 1271 files
updating to branch default
1084 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 check out the tipmost changeset (see also Clone).

See which revision was checked out:

$ cd mercurial-repo
$ hg parents
changeset:   9632:16698d87ad20
tag:         tip
user:        Nicolas Dumazet <...>
date:        Mon Sep 21 19:21:32 2009 +0200
summary:     util: use sys.argv[0] if $HG is unset and 'hg' is not in PATH

The summary command (introduced with Mercurial 1.4) will summarize the state of the working directory:

parent: 9632:16698d87ad20 tip
 util: use sys.argv[0] if $HG is unset and 'hg' is not in PATH
branch: default
commit: (clean)
update: (current)

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:

$ hg add            # add those 'unknown' files
$ hg commit         # commit all changes, edit changelog entry
$ hg parents        # see the currently checked out revision       

For a detailed description of all command see http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/hg.1.html or enter

$ hg help

to get an overview of all commands. Help for a specific command is available by giving the command name

$ hg help add

4. Clone, Commit, Merge

$ hg clone project project-work    # clone repository
$ cd project-work
$ <make changes>
$ hg commit
$ cd ../project
$ <make other changes>
$ hg commit
$ hg pull ../project-work   # pull changesets from project-work
$ hg merge                  # merge the new tip from project-work into our working directory
$ hg parents                # see the revisions that have been merged into the working directory
$ hg commit                 # commit the result of the merge

See also: Clone, Commit, Pull, Merge, Parent

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
$ hg clone http://selenic.com/hg/
$ cd hg

# pull new changes from an existing repo
$ hg pull http://selenic.com/hg/

# export your current repo via HTTP with browsable interface on port 8000
$ hg serve -n "My repo"

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

See also: Serve, Push, Pull

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