Working Trees

A working tree is the contents of a branch placed on disk so that you can see the files and edit them. The working tree is where you make changes to a branch, and when you commit the current state of the working tree is the snapshot that is recorded in the commit.

When you push a branch to a remote system, a working tree will not be created. If one is already present the files will not be updated. The branch information will be updated and the working tree will be marked as out-of-date. Updating a working tree remotely is difficult, as there may be uncommitted changes or the update may cause content conflicts that are difficult to deal with remotely.

If you have a branch with no working tree you can use the ‘checkout’ command to create a working tree. If you run ‘bzr checkout .’ from the branch it will create the working tree. If the branch is updated remotely, you can update the working tree by running ‘bzr update’ in that directory.

If you have a branch with a working tree that you do not want the ‘remove-tree’ command will remove the tree if it is safe. This can be done to avoid the warning about the remote working tree not being updated when pushing to the branch. It can also be useful when working with a ‘–no-trees’ repository (see ‘bzr help repositories’).

If you want to have a working tree on a remote machine that you push to you can either run ‘bzr update’ in the remote branch after each push, or use some other method to update the tree during the push. There is an ‘rspush’ plugin that will update the working tree using rsync as well as doing a push. There is also a ‘push-and-update’ plugin that automates running ‘bzr update’ via SSH after each push.

Useful commands:

checkout     Create a working tree when a branch does not have one.
remove-tree  Removes the working tree from a branch when it is safe to do so.
update       When a working tree is out of sync with it's associated branch
             this will update the tree to match the branch.