Introduction

Welcome to the Bazaar Version Control System’s guide for system administrators. Bazaar is a flexible system that provides many possible options for serving projects in ways that will hopefully meet your needs. If you have requirements that are not met by the current state of the Bazaar ecosystem, please let us know at bazaar@lists.canonical.com or on Launchpad at https://launchpad.net/bzr.

Scope of this guide

In this guide, we will discuss various techniques for making Bazaar projects available, migrating from other Version Control Systems, browsing code over the Web and combining Bazaar with other tools. In many of these categories, multiple options exist and we will try to explains the costs and benefits of the various options.

The intended audience for this guide is the individuals who administer the computers that will do the serving. Much of the configuration that we will discuss requires administrator privileges and we will not necessarily indicate every point that those privileges are needed. That said, reading this guide can also be very helpful for those who are interested in communicating to the system administrators about the requirements for making full use of Bazaar.

What you need to run a Bazaar server

Where possible, we will discuss both Unix (including GNU/Linux) and Windows server environments. For the purposes of this document, we will consider Mac OS X as a type of Unix.

In general, Bazaar requires only Python 2.6 or greater to run. If you would optionally like to be able to access branches using SFTP, you need paramiko and pycrypto.

For maximum performance, Bazaar can make use of compiled versions of some critical components of the code. Pure Python alternatives exist for all of these components, but they may be considerably slower. To compile these extensions, you need a C compiler and the relevant header files from the Python package. On GNU/Linux, these may be in a separate package. Other operating systems should have the required headers installed by default.

If you are installing a development version of Bazaar, rather than a released version, you will need Pyrex to create the C extensions. The release tarballs already have the Pyrex-created C files.