How to use Mercurial with Flow

How to install "flow" extension

The best way to have an "up to date" extension is cloning it from "bitbucket.org".

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/yujiewu/hgflow

So, on my local I have something like

/home/kurrlec/dev/hgflow

Now you need to create a symbolic link to the Flow file (or you can you use it directly in your hgrc configuration file)

cd /opt mkdir hgflow cd hgflow ln -s /home/YOUR_USER/dev/hgflow/src/hgflow.py

Edit "hg" configuration file: <PROJECT_DIR>/.hg/hgrc (or %USERPROFILE%/Mercurial.ini on Windows)

[extensions] flow = /opt/hgflow/hgflow.py mq = [flow] autoshelve = true

Initialization and configuration

You have to initialize hgflow for every repository where you want to use hgflow.

$ cd <my_repository_dir> $ hg flow init

The flow init command will create a configuration file: .flow in the root dir of the repository. Before doing so, it will ask you branch names or prefixes for each basic stream. Type your preferred names or press return to use the default.

Branch name for master stream: [default] Branch name for develop stream: [develop] Branch name prefix for release stream: [release/] Branch name prefix for feature stream: [feature/] Branch name prefix for hotfix stream: [hotfix/] Branch name prefix for support stream: [support/]

Since the configuration file is tracked by hg, if you have multiple existing branches, hgflow will need to write the configuration file in each open branch. This will be done automatically by hg flow init command.

How to work with features (Weiterentwicklung)

Start a feature

hg flow feature start <name>

This command will create a new feature branch based on develop branch, it named as feature/<name>. And switch to this branch automatic.

Finish a feature

hg flow feature finish <name>

This command will close the feature branch feature/<name>. The content in this branch will merge to develop branch.

Abort feature

Maybe you realise that you create a new branch but with the wrong name, don't worry, you can abort it on this way:

hg flow feature abort <my-wrong-feature>

Switch between feature branches

hg flow feature switch <name>

This command will switch the branch between feature branches. It will switch into feature/<name> branch.
This command is equals as `hg update feature/<name>`.

How to see feature branches

hg flow feature list

How to work with releases

Now that we’ve done some feature developments we’re essentially ready to do a deployment of our code to production.  Before we can do this we would want to go through some kind of process where we do some usability testing or some kind of QA.

Start a new release

hg flow release start <release-name>

Start a feature inside a release branch

hg flow release/<release-name> start <feature-name>

Finish a feature inside a release branch

hg flow release/<release-name> finish <feature-name>

Display releases

hg flow release list

This command lists all the current release branches. To make things easier you should only have one of these open at any time.

Close a release branch

Once the release has been done and your operations team has deployed the release candidate to "production", you should run the following:

hg flow release finish <release-name>

How to work with hotfix

I hope that you’ve realized that there isn’t much of a difference in the process that is followed when doing the various types of development. This is the beauty of using the workflow. You can do develop in a consistent manner and using Mercurial Flow extension makes the workflow fairly easy to follow. There are a few snags in the process that can break things down for you, but that’s only if you don’t follow it correctly or you try and take some shortcuts.

Start fixing production code

Once you have discovered a bug in production and it needs to be solved as soon as possible, you can start doing it by running the command below:

hg flow hotfix start <hotfix-name>

The <hotfix-name> could be the JIRA code, to make it easier for the whole team.

Close a hotfix branch

The process being followed by this command is the same as it was done at the release end. Once this has run, it will merge the changes you’ve made back into "master" as well as "develop" branch, so this process ensure that those changes get released with the next major release and the problem doesn’t come back.  To run this command you should run:

hg flow hotfix finish <hotfix-name>

Extended information here -> https://bitbucket.org/yujiewu/hgflow/wiki/Home.wiki#!installation