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2.5 Starting a New Project

Before they can begin work on the project, Jim needs to create a working copy — a directory whose contents monotone will keep track of. Often, one works on projects that someone else has started, and creates working copies with the checkout command, which you'll learn about later. Jim is starting a new project, though, so he does something a little bit different. He uses the monotone setup command to create a new working copy.

This command creates the named directory (if it doesn't already exist), and creates the MT directory within it. The MT directory is how monotone recognizes that a directory is a working copy, and monotone stores some bookkeeping files within it. For instance, command line values for the --db, --branch or --key options to the setup command will be cached in a file called MT/options, so you don't have to keep passing them to monotone all the time.

Jim creates his working copy:

     /home/jim$ monotone setup juice
     /home/jim$ cd juice
     /home/jim/juice$

Notice that Jim has changed his current directory to his newly created working copy. For the rest of this example we will assume that everyone issues all further monotone commands from their working copy directories.