CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosmercurialportability
BrianH
BrianH

Reputation: 2123

Mercurial on Mac and Windows - without admin?

My workflow includes having to develop at work (a University) where I don't have admin/install rights on a Macintosh OSX workstation. Right now I just use a USB stick to carry the code around, but this is so very old fashioned and makes no good use of source control principles.

I want to start using Mercurial (and/or Kiln) for my work, but is there anyway I can do so in this environment? I'm willing to use GUIs, command line, workarounds like using any weird free portable IDE configuration solely for use of a portable Mercurial plugin, etc.

I can find plenty of links for doing this on Windows, but not Mac. At the very minimum I need to be able to commit and update my local code. Everything else would be icing on the cake, but I'd settle for really minimal functionality on Mac. If need be I can do more intensive operations on own windows laptop where I can install anything I want, but without commit in a locked-down Mac environment it'll be nearly useless in my work.

Added Detail: My work is mainly web development, most recently jQuery/HTML5. My workflow mainly uses Dreamweaver for code editing and design, which is pleasantly available on all Mac workstations at my University.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 374

Answers (1)

Tom Anderson
Tom Anderson

Reputation: 47163

Yes. Use of Mercurial does not require admin rights. It does seem that the official Mercurial installer requires admin rights (because it wants to put things in /usr/local/bin), though, which is a shame.

If you look round for graphical Mercurial clients, you will find that some of those do not require admin rights to install or use. MacHg doesn't seem to, for example. Download, unzip, run, enjoy. Murky also has a zip download, so i'd guess that was the same. SourceTree has a .dmg which opens to reveal a copyable application, so that also shouldn't need admin rights - it suggests you copy it to the Applications folder, but you can put it anywhere.

I would imagine that all of these programs include a copy of the actual Mercurial somewhere. In MacHg's case, it's at MacHg.app/Contents/Resources/localhg. You can use that from the command-line as usual.

Upvotes: 4

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