NetBeans Sources - Mercurial Overview

Mercurial is the tool you use to access the NetBeans sources here on netbeans.org, either from the command line, or even using the Mercurial support built into the IDE itself! Before you start you should know how the sources are organized, both in terms of directory structure. You can browse the Mercurial repositories online to get an overview of available repositories. For more general information, read the book Distributed revision control with Mercurial.

Legal Notice

By downloading builds, source code, or accessing the Mercurial repository, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of the applicable licenses:

All the souce code made available on netbeans.org is provided to you under the terms and conditions of Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) v1.0 and the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2.

The software developed at netbeans.org may make use of third-party software components which are distributed under different licenses than the CDDL. Examples of such components may include Apache Ant, Apache Tomcat, JUnit, JavaHelp runtime, Java Compiler - a wrapper around the JDK java compiler.

All those components are either open source software or redistributable binary libraries. They are included in the builds, source code downloads and the Mercurial repository. Their licenses can be found in the

• For the IDE installation the license is in the top-level directory
• For a module source directory the license texts are in a subdirectory named "external"

It is your obligation to read and accept all such terms and conditions prior to the use of the builds and source code made available on the netbeans.org website or in the netbeans.org Mercurial repository.

Getting the Sources

These guides show you how to get anonymous access to the NetBeans.org Mercurial repository. If you do not have Mercurial installed, first download and install one of the available ports for your operating system.

• Using NetBeans (Recommended) — You can use the NetBeans IDE itself to get the sources. This method is the same for every operating system. Mercurial support is available on the Update Center for NetBeans 6.0 and standard for NetBeans 6.1+. Read: Using Mercurial to work with NetBeans Sources in the IDE
• From the command line run the following command to get the repository.

  $ hg clone http://hg.netbeans.org/main

Authenticated Push Access

Using the anonymous login, you can clone, edit and use the sources on your computer. To contribute your changes to the NetBeans repository without submitting patches and relying on other people to commit them, you'll need a free named account with push (write) privileges. The only difference from the anonymous access is that you enter your username and a non-blank password. If you think you should have a push account, please see Getting Mercurial Push Access.