Diff for "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, by either ["Pull"]ing or ["Push"]ing.

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