Mercurial Installation How-to

Growl developer documentation

What is Mercurial?

Mercurial, otherwise known as hg, is a source content management system. It is similar, in some ways, to Subversion, and helps to keep track of source code changes.

Getting Mercurial

Before you begin, make sure you have the Xcode Developer Tools installed. If you don't, you can download them for free off of the Apple Developer Connection website.

There are multiple ways to get Mercurial. Here are the four most popular on Mac OS X:

The rest of this document will assume you chose the prepackaged installer. If you chose the other two options, please refer to the documentation for those projects.

You will need to add /usr/local/bin to your path. To do that you need to edit your ~/.bash_profile file (this assumes you are using bash). To do this, open the terminal and run the following commands:

touch ~/.bash_profile
open -e ~/.bash_profile

Note that it's perfectly fine for ~/.bash_profile to be empty

This will open the ~/.bash_profile file in TextEdit. Now add the following line to the file:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

Save and close the file, then type:

source ~/.bash_profile

Mercurial should now be installed and configured correctly. Please continue to the Growl Installation Howto for more information on how to install Growl from source.

The hg Book is available on-line and is a useful resource for teaching yourself how to use Mercurial.