Hosting your code on launchpad and bazaar

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/download/issue4_en.pdf

 

Written by Chris Rowson

I recently put some code up onto Launch pad (a superb software development tool from Canonical Limited), but it wasn’t immediately apparent to me how to do it. I found tips on a few different web sites, but though t I’d bring it all together here for convenience.

Firs t of all you’ll need a launch pad account. Create one at:

https ://launchpad.net/+ login

Now you require an SSH key. This is s o you can prove to launchpad /bazaar that you are who you say you are. If you don’t already have one, here’s how to make one.

ssh-keygen -t dsa

You will now be asked for a secret password. Choose one and press enter. Your key has now been generated. You can see it by typing

nano ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub

Go to your launch pad profile now, and copy/paste the text from the file you opened in the section above, into the section marked Update SSH

Keys. That’s that bit done.

Now you need to introduce yourself to bazaar.

bzr whoami 'Your Name

email@example.com'

To create a bazaar branch on your computer, navigate to the folder that contains you code, and type the following.

bzr init

You now need to tell bazaar which files or folders with in the branch you want to record changes to. Forth is example we have a branch folder called ‘test’, which contains the files ‘hello.php’, ‘install.txt’ and a sub folder called ’stuff’.

bzr status

would return

unknown:

hello.php

install.txt

stuff/

You need to tell bazaar which files and folders you want to add to the system. You can do this by issuing the command:

bzr add

This will add all of the files and folders in the current directory recursively. You can also add files and folders individually.

bzr add hello.php

bzr add install.txt

bzr add stuff

If ’stuff’ contained any files, those files would be added too.

To remove a file (in this instance ‘ins tall.txt’) you can either delete it, the folder on your computer, or run

bzr remove install.txt

 

When you have your code in a state that you want to upload then you need to run the commit command. This creates a revision and allows you to add a message regarding the changes you’ve made.

bzr commit -m "added my

first file"

You can also selectively commit specific files.

bzr commit -m "added GPL

licence info" install.txt

Now that you’ve finished editing your code and getting it ready on your local computer, you’ll want to upload it to launch pad.

bzr push

sftp://UserName@bazaar.launch

pad.net/~UsernameOrTeamName/P

roject/Branch

To break down that url a little more, UserName is your Launch pad username, after the ~ you can then include either your launch pad username or a team name, project is the name of the project in the launch pad url and branch is what you would like to call the branch.

Note that the project must be created in launch pad before you can publish to it. If you don’t want to publish to a particular project, you can push to the + junk project instead (Thanks Dean).

So in practice.

bzr push

sftp://uberperson@bazaar.launch

pad.net/~uber-devteam/

ubuntu/development

would create a branch called ‘development’ in the ‘ubuntu’ project which can be edited by anyone in ‘uber-dev-team’. The person who created this upload would have the username ‘uberperson’ on launch pad.

Give it a couple of minutes, and you should be able to see your files go live on the launch pad site.

Helpful links:

Full Bazaar Tutorial - http://doc.bazaarvcs.org/bzr.dev/tutorial.htm

 

http://doc.bazaar-vcs.org/bzr.dev/

https://launchpad.net/