How To: Hosting Your Code On Launchpad And Bazaar

I recently put some code up onto Launchpad (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 websites, but thought I’d bring it all together here for convenience.

eZine lover (@eZine)

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Full Circle Magazine

 · 1 year ago

Written by Chris Rowson

First of all you’ll need a launchpad account. Create one at: https://launchpad.net/+login

Now you require an SSH key. This is so 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 launchpad 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 within the branch you want to record changes to. For this 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 ‘install.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 launchpad.

bzr push sftp://UserName@bazaar.launchpad.net/~UsernameOrTeamName/Project/Branch

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

Note that the project must be created in launchpad 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.launchpad.net/~uber-dev-team/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 launchpad.

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

Helpful links:

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

Next month: Matthew Revell from Canonical will explain how to use LaunchPad to properly research and report any bugs you may have noticed in K/X/Ubuntu.