Perforce p4(cli) A very Quick start guide for a Git user.
Motivation: I recently started working on a project where they got Perforce as they version control system. I was given something called as “view” and asked to clone the code onto my development directory and work on it. But I never used (Heard) about p4 before!! and I got super confused while learning it and took some significant amount of time to get myself familiar with it. So, I am writing this blog that gives you a very small and quick high-level understanding to quickly start pulling code, making changes and pushing your code.
(⚠) I will try to compare things in p4 with git terminologies so things will start to make sense pretty fast for you.
(⚠) I will use p4v (a visual client for p4) just to show things in more visual way so you will understand better. But don't worry I won't use it to make changes or do things to codebase. I will use only p4 cli command (I promise)
Where is codebase?
Just like GitHub repositories, usually the code is stored in something called DEPOT in perforce. By default, you will get a default DEPOT which is literally named as “depot” when you bring up a p4 server.
usually, your admin would have already created a depot for you, and you will be given a view with looks something like /
/depot/project1/.. //myclient/..so, for our example let's consider a depot called noob like this:
How to pull the code?
In github we have two things: local repository (which is local to your machine) and a remote repository which is hosted on github server.
Similarly, depot is our remote repo here while the local repo is called as CLIENT and sometimes referred to as a WORKSPACE. (yes, CLIENT and WORKSPACE are kind of same and used interchangeably in p4)
Now let's go to terminal and start using p4 cli (finally). Now our aim is to pull the code onto our local machine, which will be our local repository (CLIENT).
command to create a client:
p4 client <client name>
example: p4 client noobmaster:client_nameI usually give my username:client_name. so, once you issue that command, your text editor will open a form for you to make changes (form is nothing but a text file that you edit)
The above command opens the following form in your text editor.
# A Perforce Client Specification.
#
# Client: The client name.
# Update: The date this specification was last modified.
# Access: The date this client was last used in any way.
# Owner: The Perforce user name of the user who owns the client
# workspace. The default is the user who created the
# client workspace.
# Host: If set, restricts access to the named host.
# Description: A short description of the client (optional).
# Root: The base directory of the client workspace.
# AltRoots: Up to two alternate client workspace roots.
# Options: Client options:
# [no]allwrite [no]clobber [no]compress
# [un]locked [no]modtime [no]rmdir [no]altsync
# SubmitOptions:
# submitunchanged/submitunchanged+reopen
# revertunchanged/revertunchanged+reopen
# leaveunchanged/leaveunchanged+reopen
# LineEnd: Text file line endings on client: local/unix/mac/win/share.
# Type: Type of client: writeable/readonly/graph/partitioned.
# ServerID: If set, restricts access to the named server.
# View: Lines to map depot files into the client workspace.
# ChangeView: Lines to restrict depot files to specific changelists.
# Stream: The stream to which this client's view will be dedicated.
# (Files in stream paths can be submitted only by dedicated
# stream clients.) When this optional field is set, the
# View field will be automatically replaced by a stream
# view as the client spec is saved.
# StreamAtChange: A changelist number that sets a back-in-time view of a
# stream ( Stream field is required ).
# Changes cannot be submitted when this field is set.
#
# Use 'p4 help client' to see more about client views and options.
Client: noobmaster:my_client
Owner: noobmaster
Host: Red
Description:
Created by noobmaster.
Root: d:\p4
Options: noallwrite noclobber nocompress unlocked nomodtime normdir noaltsync
SubmitOptions: submitunchanged
LineEnd: local
View:
//noob/... //noobmaster:my_client/noob/...
//depot/... //noobmaster:my_client/depot/...Don't worry about the length of it, we will only care about four things in that form:
1. Client: this is the client's name you have given in the command, and we refer to this workspace with this client name from now on
2. Owner: Here Owner is the user logged into p4 shell
These two things will determine how and who refers to this client.
Now most important things to understand here are Root and View
3. Root: path on your local machine where you want the code to be pulled
4. View: Finally, the view I have been talking about from beginning, this tells p4, which code to pull, which files to include and which files to exclude etc..,.
I want to pull the code in a directory called p4, so I will leave Root as same, now we need to modify view.
In current state there is no code in our DEPOT (Remote repo), so let's add some code (two folders and two files outside the project).
If you observe each line in the view above is divided into two parts
View:
//noob/... //noobmaster:my_client/noob/...
//depot/... //noobmaster:my_client/depot/...I separated them with some space for you :)
left half shows the path on your DEPOT (Remote repository)
Right half shows client name followed by the path from your local repository.
and the line is called view mapping.
Alright, in our case this is empty project so let's add files and folders to root of the DEPOT.
Also if you see second line is //depot which is the default depot, which is not for us in this tutorial so I will remove that line completely.
My view would look like :
View:
//noob/... //noobmaster:my_client/...DEPOT (Remote repo): //noob/…
CLIENT (local)://noobmaster:my_client/…
I don't have the folders and files created yet so I will just give my client's name on the CLIENT half of the view mapping.
Save the file and close it.
# A Perforce Client Specification.
#
# Client: The client name.
# Update: The date this specification was last modified.
# Access: The date this client was last used in any way.
# Owner: The Perforce user name of the user who owns the client
# workspace. The default is the user who created the
# client workspace.
# Host: If set, restricts access to the named host.
# Description: A short description of the client (optional).
# Root: The base directory of the client workspace.
# AltRoots: Up to two alternate client workspace roots.
# Options: Client options:
# [no]allwrite [no]clobber [no]compress
# [un]locked [no]modtime [no]rmdir [no]altsync
# SubmitOptions:
# submitunchanged/submitunchanged+reopen
# revertunchanged/revertunchanged+reopen
# leaveunchanged/leaveunchanged+reopen
# LineEnd: Text file line endings on client: local/unix/mac/win/share.
# Type: Type of client: writeable/readonly/graph/partitioned.
# ServerID: If set, restricts access to the named server.
# View: Lines to map depot files into the client workspace.
# ChangeView: Lines to restrict depot files to specific changelists.
# Stream: The stream to which this client's view will be dedicated.
# (Files in stream paths can be submitted only by dedicated
# stream clients.) When this optional field is set, the
# View field will be automatically replaced by a stream
# view as the client spec is saved.
# StreamAtChange: A changelist number that sets a back-in-time view of a
# stream ( Stream field is required ).
# Changes cannot be submitted when this field is set.
#
# Use 'p4 help client' to see more about client views and options.
Client: noobmaster:my_client
Owner: noobmaster
Host: Red
Description:
Created by noobmaster.
Root: d:\p4
Options: noallwrite noclobber nocompress unlocked nomodtime normdir noaltsync
SubmitOptions: submitunchanged
LineEnd: local
View:
//noob/... //noobmaster:my_client/...
you can list all the clients that are present on your machine by using
p4 clients
and you can filter based on the owner by giving
p4 -u <username> clients
Now that our client is ready, lets create some folders and files and add them to repository.
Remember that we mentioned Root: D:\p4 , so let's create the files and folders in there:
First let's add files:
Now we add these two files using p4 add command, but we need to mention which client we should use when we are making changes to the code base, so we do it like:
p4 -c <client name> add file1.txt
//or
p4 -c <client name> add *
//to add all files in this directory level at the same time
And now we have added them we are at a `git commit` kind of state (metaphorically). and then you ‘git push’ the changes, but in p4 you do p4 submit (with the client's name OfCourse
p4 -c noobmaster:my_client submitThis again will open one form to write the description and it looks like this:
# A Perforce Change Specification.
#
# Change: The change number. 'new' on a new changelist.
# Date: The date this specification was last modified.
# Client: The client on which the changelist was created. Read-only.
# User: The user who created the changelist.
# Status: Either 'pending' or 'submitted'. Read-only.
# Type: Either 'public' or 'restricted'. Default is 'public'.
# Description: Comments about the changelist. Required.
# ImportedBy: The user who fetched or pushed this change to this server.
# Identity: Identifier for this change.
# Jobs: What opened jobs are to be closed by this changelist.
# You may delete jobs from this list. (New changelists only.)
# Stream: What opened stream is to be added to this changelist.
# You may remove an opened stream from this list.
# Files: What opened files from the default changelist are to be added
# to this changelist. You may delete files from this list.
# (New changelists only.)
Change: new
Client: noobmaster:my_client
User: pavan
Status: new
Description:
<enter description here>
Files:
//noob/file1.txt # add
//noob/file2.txt # addYou guess it, this is we write our commit message.. I will just write “Adding two files in Depot root”, save and close the file.
you can note the change number (23 in above screen shot) and see it describe like this:
Noe let's see the depot on p4v and see how the files are saved:
Now you can't add an empty directory so I will create a src directory with a dummy file in it which looks like this:
let's add this file and submit the changes.
Now let's see p4v to see how folder structure is in DEPOT now.
Now let's assume that our work is done, and so we delete the client now using p4 client -d
and so p4v shows no workspaces or clients on its right-side pane:
In next post lets see how to close this code onto different machine or user or path, and add more files and edit existing files.
I will make changes to view mappings in next post as now we have some basic code to work with.
