Putting an existing project under version control

If you already have a tree of source code (or directory of documents) you wish to put under version control, here are the commands to use:

cd my-stuff
bzr init
bzr add
bzr commit -m "Initial import"

bzr init creates a .bzr directory in the top level directory (my-stuff in the example above). Note that:

• Bazaar has everything it needs in that directory - you do not need to setup a database, web server or special service to use it
• Bazaar is polite enough to only create one .bzr in the directory given, not one in every subdirectory thereof.

bzr add then finds all the files and directories it thinks ought to be version controlled and registers them internally. bzr commit then records a snapshot of the content of these and records that information, together with a commit message.

More information on init, add and commit will be provided later. For now, the important thing to remember is the recipe above.

Starting a new project

If you are starting a project from scratch, you can also use the recipe above, after creating an empty directory first of course. For efficiency reasons that will be explored more in later chapters though, it is a good idea to create a repository for the project at the top level and to nest a main branch within it like this:

bzr init-repo my.repo
cd my.repo
bzr init my.main
cd my.main
hack, hack, hack
bzr add
bzr commit -m "Initial import"

Some users prefer a name like trunk or dev to main. Choose whichever name makes the most sense to you.

Note that the init-repo and init commands both take a path as an argument and will create that path if it doesn’t already exist.