Perforce Client Setup

For anyone who is is unfortunate enough to work with Perforce – and so I don’t have to remember – here’s a quick-and-dirty kick-start guide for setting up a client workstation. (Note I’m on a Mac so your mileage may vary.)

First things first, install the perforce software available from http://www.perforce.com/perforce/downloads.

Next, in order to avoid various command-line arguments, I have the following environment variables set:

export P4EDITOR="$EDITOR"export P4USER="username"export P4PORT="1666"export P4HOST="clientname.local"export P4CLIENT="clientname"

If you’re using SSH, you’ll need to create a tunnel to the server. Something like this should work:

ssh -L1666:server:1666 -p 22 -N -t -x username@server

This sets things up so all requests to localhost:1666 are routed over ssh to the remote server. You can then setup the client:

p4 client

This will launch your default editor – in my case that’s TextMate but nano/pico/emacs/vi/etc will do – and allow you to modify the following fields:

Client:  clientnameOwner:  usernameHost:  clientname.localRoot:  /path/to/projects/View:

See the documentation for an explanation on how to set-up the View. In my case, I’m running a rails application, so I have some rules to exclude various generated and client specific directories:

-//depot/projectname/config/database.yml //clientname/projectname/config/database.yml-//depot/projectname/db/schema.rb //clientname/projectname/log/schema.rb-//depot/projectname/log/... //clientname/projectname/log/...-//depot/projectname/tmp/... //clientname/projectname/tmp/...

Finally, to get a copy of the latest source code in /path/to/projects/projectname, run:

p4 sync

And because I just can’t help myself, by way of comparison, here’s the equivalent instructions for subversion:

svn co svn+ssh://username@repositoryurl/trunk/projectname

Gosh, wasn’t that difficult.