Simon Kenyon Shepard :: justLikeThat.

I love using new technology. I really do. It’s great, basic things you knew how to do with an older system, get reinvented and become no longer trivial. They become a long drawn out, painful process, that involves your blood pressure raising to that perfect level where it reduces you lifespan by a twenty minutes. Each time.

So when I switched to command line Mercurial from Tortoise GUI SVN, you can imagine my delight.

To be fair, I actually had already got command line SVN experience, so thought the transition might be somewhat simpler. It wasn’t. The commands may be very similar but the process itself is not.

Frustratingly it is actually very simple once you know the command-set to get you up and running, unfortunately no has written a basic, 123 guide to setting up a googleCode mercurial instance on windows XP. So I thought I’d be the first.

1. Download and install Mercurial command line. Make sure to check the last check box on the installation screen along with the readme, this allows you to access Mercurial from the command line.
2. Create your Google code project. This part’s easy, follow the steps enter the words and navigate youself to the main project screen. It helps if you already have a Google account.
3. Now we get to the fun part. Open your command line in windows, by going to Start->run->type cmd in the input box and click ok. Or if you have style double click the short-cut you’ve created for yourself on the desktop.
4. You’ll want to navigate to a folder where you can store your project. For the sake of this example, lets say your project is named testproject and is in the root of c:\. first back out to the root with:

   cd \
   

5. Then make a directory to store the project in:

    mkdir testproject

6. enter the directory

    cd testproject 

7. Now you want to take a clone of your googlecode repository, to do this type the following command:

   hg clone https://testproject.googlecode.com/hg/ testproject
   

8. The last parameter is the directory to copy it into on the local file system. This should result in Mercurial spewing out some output identifying that it has correctly downloaded.
9. To check, type:

   cd testproject
   dir
   

10. If it was successful, you’ll see a directory called “.hg”
11. If it’s there, now you want to make your first commit. Create a text file called readme and dump it in the directory with the .hg in. To add your new files type:

    hg add *
    

12. Next you’ll want to commit them, type:

    hg commit -m "added first file to repository"
    

13. So you have commited your first change to the repository, but this does not mean it’s gone up to the main node on Google, it is currently just committed to your local file server. To commit the changes back up to Google’s servers, you’ll need to run the following:

    hg push
    

    This will prompt you for a user name and password, the password IS NOT YOUR DEFAULT PASSWORD. Go to your accounts hosting page to find it.

14. Now, if your like me, i.e. LAZY, you don’t want to have to enter your username and password each friggin’ time you want to push. You want an automated way to authenticate your https googlecode push actions. The way to get around this is to open the “.hg” directory and find the file “hgrc”. Edit this in your preferred text editor. Where you see the line

15. default = https://testproject.googlecode.com/hg

16. change it to

17. https://(your username here):(your password here)@testproject.googlecode.com/hg

18. And Voila! everytime you push, it automatically skips the login and password steps.

I hope this helps, I spent sometime this weekend trawling the internet for clues as to how to do this most basic of processes but could find no simple explanation, written in a language people could understand.