Table of Contents (3.3.22)

# Starting a project

## Putting an existing project under version control

If you already have a tree of source code (or directory of documents) you wish to put under version control, here are the commands to use:

    cd my-stuff
    brz init
    brz add
    brz commit -m "Initial import"

`brz init` creates a `.brz` directory in the top level directory (`my-stuff` in the example above). Note that:

> - Breezy has everything it needs in that directory - you do not need to setup a database, web server or special service to use it

> - Breezy is polite enough to only create one `.brz` in the directory given, not one in every subdirectory thereof.

`brz add` then finds all the files and directories it thinks ought to be version controlled and registers them internally. `brz commit` then records a snapshot of the content of these and records that information, together with a commit message.

More information on `init`, `add` and `commit` will be provided later. For now, the important thing to remember is the recipe above.

## Starting a new project

If you are starting a project from scratch, you can also use the recipe above, after creating an empty directory first of course. For efficiency reasons that will be explored more in later chapters though, it is a good idea to create a repository for the project at the top level and to nest a main branch within it like this:

    brz init-shared-repo my.repo
    cd my.repo
    brz init my.main
    cd my.main
    hack, hack, hack
    brz add
    brz commit -m "Initial import"

Some users prefer a name like trunk or dev to main. Choose whichever name makes the most sense to you.

Note that the `init-shared-repo` and `init` commands both take a path as an argument and will create that path if it doesn’t already exist.