CVS: Create a new project

Contributed by wolf359 September 4, 2005  
Tagged: UNIX software

In CVS, a project is a collection of files and possibly directory trees of files. A project can represent the source code for a programming project, the set of configuration files for a specific server, or the chapter of a book. This describes how to make a new project in an existing CVS repository.

Start with some files and possibly directories that you want in the project. At a minimum, you can create an empty directory, project1 in this example.

mkdir project1
cd project1

From within this directory (cd project1), run the cvs command with the import option:

cvs import project1 Project-one v1


After executing this command, you’ll find yourself in the vi editor with a file asking you to enter a log. This is information describing the project. To add text to this, type i to start inserting text, type the text describing your project, press ENTER and then ESC. Type :wq to write the file and quit.

This execution of the command assumes that the CVSROOT environment variable has been set. If this has not been done, then you must include a -d /path/to/cvsroot after the cvs in the command.

The command syntax is cvs import project-name vendor_tag release_tag where project1 is the project name in the example above. The vendor_tag and release_tag are not important here, but must be present. What they are doesn’t matter as long as they start with a character.