Working with others

Although one can use Pijul to work alone, for instance to store the history of changes of a project, or synchronise work with another machine, it is mainly useful (and more efficient than other solutions) when working with other people.

The only way to collaborate with others in Pijul is to send and receive patches, and apply them to one’s repository. When working on an existing project, it might be necessary to clone it first. For instance, in order to clone Pijul’s main repository, you can run the following command:

pijul clone https://nest.pijul.com/pijul/pijul

This just downloads all the patches currently in the remote repository, applies them all, and outputs the result to a new working copy. Further patch exchange can be done with the two commands pull (receive patches) and push (send patches), as we explain now.

Between local repositories

Patches can also be exchanged between local repositories, in both directions (push and pull). As an example, let’s create two repositories, and exchange two patches between them:

mkdir a
cd a
pijul init
echo "blabla" > file
pijul add file
pijul record
cd ..

pijul clone a b
cd b
cat file # should contain "blabla"
echo "blibli" >> file
pijul record
pijul push ../a
echo "one extra line" >> file
pijul record

cd ../a
pijul pull ../b

SSH

Pijul can work with remote repositories over SSH just like local repositories. A working Pijul needs to be installed on the remote machine, though.

As an example, if you have an account called “me”, and a repository named “repo” under that account on nest.pijul.com, you can run for instance:

pijul clone me@ssh.pijul.com:me/repo

To clone your repository, and:

pijul push me@ssh.pijul.com:me/repo

To send your local patches to your repository there. Just as with a local repository, pulling patches can also be done over SSH:

pijul pull me@ssh.pijul.com:me/repo

HTTP

Pijul is able to download patches from HTTP and HTTPS servers. In the above example, receiving new patches from Pijul’s main repository can be done by running:

pijul pull https://nest.pijul.com/pijul/pijul

However, Pijul is not (yet) able to push patches to an HTTP URL.