view help/a-10.html @ 565:c2e212ab0068

Make it possible to set an empty remote URL, fixing #357

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<h2>Someone gave me a repository URL and asked me to clone it</h2>

<p>A Mercurial repository location is usually described by a URL, like
that of a website.</p>

<p>For example, the URL for the repository containing the source code for
EasyMercurial itself is <code>https://bitbucket.org/cannam/easyhg</code>.</p>

<p>To get a copy of the files in a repository, you need to <i>clone</i> the
repository from the remote URL into a folder on your own computer.  To
do this,</p>

<p><b>1. Click the Open toolbar button or use File -> Open</b></p>

<p><center><img src="images/openremote50.png"></center></p>

<p><b>2. Select &ldquo;Remote repository&rdquo; as the thing you want to open</b></p>

<p><b>3. Enter the repository URL into the URL field</b></p>

<p><b>4. Give the name of a folder on your local computer to clone into</b> &ndash;
 this folder will be created for you, so it shouldn't be one that already
 exists</p>

<p><b>5. Click OK</b></p>

<p>If the remote repository has restricted access, you may be asked to
provide a username and password to log in to the server it is hosted
on.  If the repository is large, you may have to wait a while for all the
data to be transferred.</p>

<p>Provided the clone has been successful, you should now have a local
repository to start working in.
<ul><li>Note: the equivalent Mercurial command for this is <b>hg clone</b></li></ul>