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.
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.
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>
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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/>.