2.5 Starting a New Project

Before he can begin work on the project, Jim needs to create a workspace — a directory whose contents monotone will keep track of. Often, one works on projects that someone else has started, and creates workspaces 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 mtn setup command to create a new workspace.

This command creates the named directory (if it doesn’t already exist), and creates the _MTN directory within it. The _MTN directory is how monotone recognizes that a directory is a workspace, 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 _MTN/options, so you don’t have to keep passing them to monotone all the time.

He chooses jp.co.juicebot.jb7 as a branch name. (See Naming Conventions for more information about appropriate branch names.) Jim then creates his workspace:

/home/jim$ mtn --db=jim.mtn --branch=jp.co.juicebot.jb7 setup juice
/home/jim$ cd juice
/home/jim/juice$

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