How to use Bazaar and Launchpad for Hosting your Code
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.
First of all you’ll need a launchpad account. Go create one.
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 them 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.
That’s about it. If I’ve made any mistakes or anything seems misleading, please add a comment so I can fix it 
Helpful links:
As suggested by Dean in the article comments, this has also been added to the Ubuntu wiki here.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 10:27 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 26th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Nice tutorial Chris! You don’t have to do bzr add ‘path’, you just do bzr add, and it will add anything in the current directory recursively.
Maybe it’s also worth saying that the project must be created if it doesn’t already exist. (or you can push to the +junk product.)
April 26th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Thanks Dean, I’ve modified the tutorial to reflect your comments
April 26th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Hi Chris,
Great tutorial! When I first used bzr/launchpad i had exactly the same problem. Maybe you would like to add to wiki
However, I should point out that launchpad isn’t currently open-source.
April 26th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Hey there, I didn’t mean that launchpad is an open-source tool, but that its used to create open-source software. Does it come across as being confusing?
April 26th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Also, added this to the Ubuntu wiki https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaunchpadStepByStepInstructions
May 10th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
I am following your tutorial in Windows – how do I get cygwin to do ssh-keygen, etc.
May 12th, 2007 at 8:45 am
Hi Fritz. I don’t use Cygwin myself, but found a tutorial here that might be of interest to you http://www.mines.edu/~gmurray/HowTo/sshNotes.html
December 28th, 2007 at 7:22 am
[...] How to use Bazaar and Launchpad for Hosting your Code (tags: bazaar bzr howto launchpad programming) [...]
February 14th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
[...] Starting using bzr. Short howto and a guide [...]
August 6th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
A great guide, thanks.
As shown in launchpad itself, a bzr shortcut for pushing to launchpad is bzr push lp:~username/projectname/branchname
i.e. “lp:” instead of “sftp://UserName@bazaar.launchpad.net/”
I think that’s right …
May 2nd, 2009 at 10:47 am
very nice help full tute…
Note:sometimes if while push command it demand password for private key so use the passphrese that used for making dsa key.
August 23rd, 2009 at 5:38 am
Hi from New York And thanks for the web site. It was just the thing I had been looking for. It has helped me no end. Thanks again
May 4th, 2010 at 8:57 am
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