Setting a username

The first thing you should do is set the username Mercurial will use for commits. It's best to configure a proper email address in ~/.hgrc 1 (or on a Windows system in %USERPROFILE%\Mercurial.ini) by creating it and adding lines like the following:

[ui] username = John Doe

Working on an existing Mercurial project

If you have a URL to a browsable project repository (for example https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg), you can grab a copy like so:

$ hg clone https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg mercurial-repo 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 most recent changeset on the default branch.

The 'summary' command will summarize the state of the working directory. Command names may be abbreviated, so entering just 'hg sum' is enough:

$ hg sum 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)

Here commit: (clean) means that there no local changes, update: (current) means that the checked out files (in the working directory) are updated to the newest revision in the repository.

Setting up a new Mercurial project

You'll want to start by creating a repository in the directory containing your project:

$ cd project/ $ hg init # creates .hg

Mercurial will look for a file named .hgignore 2 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 'status':

$ 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 into a new changeset, edit changelog entry $ hg parents # see the currently checked out revision (or changeset)

To get help on commands, simply run:

$ hg help

Clone, commit, merge

$ hg clone project project-work # clone repository $ cd project-work $ $ hg commit $ cd ../project $ $ 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

Exporting a patch

(make changes) $ hg commit $ hg export tip # display the full details of the most recent commit

Network support

# clone from the primary Mercurial repo $ hg clone https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg $ cd hg # pull new changesets from an existing other repo into the repository (.hg) $ hg pull https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg # export your current repo via HTTP with browsable interface on port 8000 $ hg serve -n "My repo" # push changesets to a remote repo with SSH $ hg push ssh://[email protected]/hg/