Mercurial and HgMercurial for Eclipse and Zend Studios

Install Mercurial

→ recently added a more detailed step-by-step-installation-guide for Mercurial on OSX, Ubuntu and Windows and also how to configure ssh.

Same as using Git we have to tell Mercurial some user informations. Mercurial searches for user data in a file named “hgrc“:

[ui]
username = ekke <ekke@ekkes-corner.org>

I place this file in my  repositories directly below .hg:

(Unix, Windows) yourRepository/.hg/hgrc

more informations about global locations of hgrc see here.

Install HgMercurial

There are also UpdateSites available for HgEclipse – I used the Snapshot Updatesite: http://hge.javaforge.com/mercurialeclipse-snapshots.

You should use MercurialEclipse 1.7.0 or later – there were huge performance improvements from 1.6.x to 1.7.0.

Unfortunately Intland changed the behaviour of the Updatesite

http://cbes.javaforge.com/update

– now you need an Account and Password from JavaForge 

From my POV an Updatesite for Open Source Software (EPL) should always be free from registrations – and luckily Andrei Loskutov provides the release and snapshots at EclipseLabs free from password or account 

This is the easy-without-password-to-use Updatesite for MercurialEclipse 1.7.0 release

http://mercurialeclipse.eclipselabs.org.codespot.com/hg.wiki/update_site/stable

and this is the Updatesite for the snapshots of upcoming 1.8.x:

http://mercurialeclipse.eclipselabs.org.codespot.com/hg.wiki/update_site/snapshots

Please select “MercurialEclipse” on all platforms.

As next step please open Eclipse Preferences:

There are two important properties you should fill out:

• Mercurial Executable -> pointing to hg executable
• Mercurial Username -> username and email address

Apply changes and you’re done with Installation of Mercurial and HgEclipse.

Summary part 1: its nearly the same work to install Git + EGit or Mercurial + HgEclipse. Only under Windows the Mercurial + HgEclipse – Installation is a one-step-process through HgEclipse UpdateSite – unfortunately this comfort isn’t available under OSX and Ubuntu. EGit also includes JGit – but we’ll see later that in some cases we still need Git itself also to be installed.

Update 2010-02-22: HgMercurial UpdateSite for Snapshots changed to: http://hge.javaforge.com/mercurialeclipse-snapshots, also added info aboutstep-by-step-install-git, step-by-step-install-mercurial and step-by-step-configure-ssh. Added Link to Martin Fowlers article aboutVersionControlTools.

Update 2010-11-20: MercurialEclipse Version 1.7.0 was released, unfortunately the Updatesites now needs an account and password from JavaForge, to avoid this please use Updatesites from EclipseLabs for the stable release 1.7.0 and this site for the 1.8.x snapshots. Update to 1.7.0 is really recommended

The overview of this blog series can be found here: http://ekkescorner.wordpress.com/blog-series/git-mercurial/. The next part will tell you how to initialize local repositories using Egit and HgEclipse.