Bazaar in five minutes

Introduction

Bazaar is a distributed version control system that makes it easier for people to work together on software projects.

Over the next five minutes, you'll learn how to put your files under version control, how to record changes to them, examine your work, publish it and send your work for merger into a project's trunk.

Installation

This guide doesn't describe how to install Bazaar but it's usually very easy. You can find installation instructions at:

For other platforms and to install from source code, see the Download and Installation pages.

Introducing yourself

Bazaar records changes to source code, and it records who made the change. The person is identified by their name and email address. (If you're concerned about spam, you don't need to use a real address that you actually read, but the convention is that it looks like an email address.)

Before you start working, let's tell Bazaar who you are. Using your name and email address, instead of John Doe's, type:

$ bzr whoami "John Doe <john.doe@gmail.com>"

You can check what identity is stored in Bazaar's configuration:

$ bzr whoami
John Doe <john.doe@gmail.com>

Starting a new project

Let's suppose we want to store a new project under Bazaar. First, we'll make a repository directory to hold all our work related to this project. We can then have multiple branch directories under here, and they'll all store the committed history in the repository.

bzr init-repo sample
cd sample
bzr init trunk
cd trunk

Making changes to your files

Let's change a file and commit that change to your branch.

Edit test1.txt in your favourite editor, then check what have you done:

$ bzr diff
=== modified file 'test1.txt'
--- test1.txt   2007-10-08 17:56:14 +0000
+++ test1.txt   2007-10-08 17:46:22 +0000
@@ -0,0 +1,1 @@
+test test test

Commit your work to the Bazaar branch:

$ bzr commit -m "Added first line of text"
Committed revision 2.

Viewing the revision log

You can see the history of your branch by browsing its log:

$ bzr log
------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 2
committer: John Doe <john.doe@gmail.com>
branch nick: myproject
timestamp: Mon 2007-10-08 17:56:14 +0000
message:
  Added first line of text
------------------------------------------------------------
revno: 1
committer: John Doe <john.doe@gmail.com>
branch nick: myproject
timestamp: Mon 2006-10-08 17:46:22 +0000
message:
  Initial import

Publishing your branch on Launchpad

Launchpad is a suite of development and hosting tools for software projects. You can use it to publish your branch. (You can also publish branches onto your own server or other hosting services.)

If you don't have a Launchpad account, follow the account signup guide and register an SSH key in your new Launchpad account.

Replacing john.doe with your own Launchpad username, type:

$ bzr push lp:~john.doe/+junk/myproject

Note: +junk is a place to store experimental branches not associated with any particular project. Normally, you should push a project into an existing project, or register a new project through the web interface.

Now, anyone can create their own copy of your branch by typing:

$ bzr branch lp:~john.doe/+junk/myproject

You can also see information about your branch, including its revision history, at https://code.launchpad.net/people/+me/+junk/myproject

Creating your own copy of another branch

To work with someone else's code, you can make your own copy of their branch. Let's take a real-world example, Bazaar's GTK interface:

$ bzr init-repo ~/bzr-gtk
$ bzr branch lp:~bzr/bzr-gtk/trunk ~/bzr-gtk/john
Branched 292 revision(s).

Bazaar will download all the files and complete revision history from the bzr-gtk project's trunk branch and create a copy called john.

Now, you have your own copy of the branch and can commit changes with or without a net connection. You can share your branch at any time by publishing it and, if the bzr-gtk team want to use your work, Bazaar makes it easy for them to merge your branch back into their trunk branch.

Updating your branch from the main branch

While you commit changes to your branch, it's likely that other people will also continue to commit code to the parent branch.

To make sure your branch stays up to date, you should merge changes from the parent into your personal branch:

$ bzr merge
Merging from saved parent location: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bzr/bzr-gtk/trunk
All changes applied successfully.

Check what has changed:

$ bzr diff

If different branches have made changes to the same areas of the same files, then merging them may generate conflicts. When this happens, Bazaar puts text markers like <<<<<<< into the files, and records them in a list of conflicted files. You should edit the files to reflect the way you want to resolve the conflicts, use bzr diff to check the changes, and then bzr resolve to mark them as resolved.

If you're happy with the changes, you can commit them to your personal branch:

$ bzr commit -m "Merge from main branch"
Committed revision 295.

Learning more

You can find out more about Bazaar in the Bazaar User Guide.

To learn about Bazaar on the command-line:

$ bzr help

To learn about the ''foo'' topic or command:

$ bzr help foo

Licence

Copyright 2007-2011 Canonical Ltd. Bazaar is free software, and you may use, modify and redistribute both Bazaar and this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. See <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.