My Mercurial Workflow « IT Management, Web Development

About a year ago, I wrote an article on this website about Version Control.  In that article, I touted the glory of Subversion, and mentioned:

“I’ve since tried other VCS systems like Mercurial, Git, and Bazaar, but have not found any compelling reason to switch.”

Well, I’ve since found my compelling reasons to switch.  SVN lost some of our files, and it was a pain to do all sorts of stuff (get setup, keep clean, branch, merge, etc).  I won’t get into; there are enough rants about Subversion on the ‘net already.  We use Mercurial now, and boy has our workflow improved.

Mercurial is my new favorite child, because it’s easy to setup, easy to use, easy to branch and merge, and easy to teach to my students.  Oh, and it just works.  Sometimes I think it runs off magic.

In order to help my colleagues make the transition from SVN to Hg, I came up with a few diagrams to explain the workflow.  I thought I’d share them here.

Mercurial Recipe for Success

You will Need:

1. Mercurial.  Grab and install it from the official site.
2. Your files.  You know, all of those css, html, and php files that you’ve been working so hard on.
3. A repository server.  If you don’t have one, go get a free account at Bitbucket.
4. A web server.  Install Mercurial here too.

The Workflow:

Setting up a Mercurial Repository

Day-to-Day Developer Workflow