Setting up a central repository

While the centralized workflow can be used by socially nominating any branch on any computer as the central one, in practice most teams have a dedicated server for hosting central branches.

Just as it’s best practice to use a shared repository locally, it’s advisable to put central branches in a shared repository. Note that central shared branches typically only want to store history, not working copies of files, so their enclosing repository is usually creating using the no-trees option, e.g.:

bzr init-repo --no-trees sftp://centralhost/srv/bzr/PROJECT

You can think of this step as similar to setting up a new cvsroot or Subversion repository. However, Bazaar gives you more flexibility in how branches may be organised in your repository. See Advanced shared repository layouts in the appendices for guidelines and examples.

Starting a central branch

There are two ways of populating a central branch with some initial content:

1. Making a local branch and pushing it to a central location
2. Making an empty central branch then committing content to it.

Here is an example of the first way:

bzr init-repo PROJECT  (prepare local repository)
bzr init PROJECT/trunk
cd PROJECT/trunk
                       (copy development files)
cp -ar ~/PROJECT .     (copy files in using OS-specific tools)
bzr add                (populate repository; start version control)
bzr commit -m "Initial import"
                       (publish to central repository)
bzr push sftp://centralhost/srv/bzr/PROJECT/trunk

Here is an example of the second way:

bzr init-repo PROJECT  (prepare local repository)
cd PROJECT
bzr init sftp://centralhost/srv/bzr/PROJECT/trunk
bzr checkout sftp://centralhost/srv/bzr/PROJECT/trunk
cd trunk
cp -ar ~/PROJECT .     (copy files in using OS-specific tools)
bzr add                (populate repository; start version control)
bzr commit -m "Initial import"
                       (publish to central repository)

Note that committing inside a working tree created using the checkout command implicitly commits the content to the central location as well as locally. Had we used the branch command instead of checkout above, the content would have only been committed locally.

Working trees that are tightly bound to a central location like this are called checkouts. The rest of this chapter explains their numerous features in more detail.