What is Mercurial?

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. Mercurial is free software licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2. It efficiently handles projects of any size, and offers an easy and intuitive interface. With Mercurial you can efficiently handle projects of any size. It's easy to use and hard to break, making it ideal for anyone working with versioned files.

Mercurial is used for version control of files. Similar projects include Git and Bazaar. Version control systems without a distributed architecture include Subversion and CVS.. Traditional version control systems such as Subversion are typical client-server architectures with a central server to store the revisions of a project. In contrast, Mercurial is truly distributed, giving each developer a local copy of the entire development history. This way it works independent of network access or a central server.

Mercurial was written with platform independence in mind. Therefore most of Mercurial is written in Python, with a small part in portable C for performance reasons. As a result, binary releases are available on all major platforms.

The functionality of Mercurial can be increased with extensions, either by activating the official ones which are shipped with Mercurial or downloading some from the wiki or by writing your own. Extensions are written in Python and can change the workings of the basic commands, add new commands and access all the core functions of Mercurial.

Mercurial sports a consistent command set in which most subversion users feel right at home. Potentially dangerous actions are available via extensions you need to enable, so the basic interface is easy to use, easy to learn and hard to break.

Mercurial + Us = Awesome

As of December 2014, we have pushed Mercurial across our Shared Server fleet on A Small Orange as a companion to our existing development stack. All shared servers have the availability of using Mercurial

Workflows

See Basic, Advanced and More Complex Workflows available via the Mercurial website.

Mercurial Help

• Tutorial - exhaustive tutorial

• Mercurial: The Definitive Guide - a very detailed description of Mercurial including behind the scenes, an indepth article on the design of Mercurial

• Understanding Mercurial - the concepts behind Mercurial