Tutorial - Getting started: Installation
(This page is part of the Tutorial series. Next part is TutorialInit)
Installing Mercurial is straightforward.
For Linux, MacOS X, and other Unix variants, follow the UnixInstall directions.
On Windows, follow the WindowsInstall instructions.
Once you're done, come back here.
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: add add the specified files on the next commit annotate show changeset information per file line clone make a copy of an existing repository commit commit the specified files or all outstanding changes (...) use "hg help" for the full list of commands or "hg -v" for details
To determine what version of Mercurial we are running, let's type:
$ hg version Mercurial Distributed SCM (version 1.7.3) (see http://mercurial.selenic.com for more information) Copyright (C) 2005-2010 Matt Mackall and others This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Mercurial will need a username to use for recording commits. It's best to configure Mercurial to use your email address by creating a file .hgrc1 in your home directory (or on Windows in %USERPROFILE%\Mercurial.ini, MercurialIni) containing lines like the following:
[ui] username = John Doe <john@example.com>
If all has gone well, let's continue on to TutorialInit.