Project Hosting on Google Code provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects. Each project comes with its own member controls, Subversion/Mercurial repository, issue tracker, wiki pages, and downloads section. Our project hosting service is simple, fast, reliable, and scalable, so that you can focus on your own open source development.

This guide provides information on:

• Contributing Open Source Code
• Working with your Project
• Customizing your Project
• Working with your Source Repository
• Documenting your Project
• Tracking Project Tasks
• Sharing Releases
• Finding Further Help

Contributing Open Source Code

Before you create a new project, please search for existing projects on this site and elsewhere on the web. It is better to help out with an existing project than to start one from scratch.

• Go to the Project Hosting main page and search for existing projects (How to join a project)
• Go to the Create Project page and fill out the form. Remember, pick good labels (see Project Hosting main page for examples).
• How to choose a license.
• How to choose a version control system.

Working with your Project

Customizing your Project

You can use the functionality under the Administer tab to customize your project. This tab is visible only to project owners. The following subtabs are useful when creating new projects:

• Project Summary subtab -- You can modify some of the options that you set during project creation, as well as set up blogs, analytics, and a custom project logo. This also provides another opportunity to set up project labels, which will help others find your project.
• Project Members subtab -- You can add new owners or committers to the project.
• Source subtab -- You can elect to have non-project members review your code.

You'll also likely want to set up mailing lists for notifications of commits and issue changes. The emails allow project members and others to keep track of changes to the source code that might affect them. To set up mailing lists, perform the following:

1. If you need to create mailing lists, you may want to use Google Groups.
2. Add codesite-noreply@google.com as an allowed poster to all mailing lists that will receive notifications.
3. In your project, click the Administer tab.
4. Click the Source subtab.
5. In the Activity Notifications area, enter mailing lists that will receive notifications of All commits and click Save Changes.
6. Click the Issue Tracking subtab.
7. In the Activity Notifications area, enter mailing lists that will receive notifications of All issue changes and click Save Changes.

Working with your Source Repository

Each project has its own Subversion or Mercurial repository.

• Learn more about using Subversion.
• Learn more about using Mercurial.

Perform the following to check code in and out of your source repository:

1. For instructions on how to check out a project's repository from the command line, go to the Source tab. Any user, regardless of whether they have a Google account, can check out and browse the repository anonymously, while project owners and committers are granted full read and write permissions. You can add project owners and committers at the Administer tab.
2. If you plan on synching from an existing repository, you must click the Reset This Repository link at the bottom of the Source tab page before making any other changes to your project's repository. This includes creating any new wiki pages because resetting the repository results in the loss of wiki content. Do not start a wiki page in your project before you complete this step.

After you've been working with your project for a while, the following subtabs on the Source tab will come in handy:

• Browse subtab -- Allows you to browse the files and directories in your project as they existed at a point in time.
• Changes subtab -- Lists changes made to the repository. You can also use this subtab to start a code review of any change.

Documenting your Project

You can use the functionality under the Wiki tab to create wiki pages for your project. Our wiki syntax is inspired by the MoinMoin wiki syntax, and is more or less a subset of it. We've found that MoinMoin is one of the most popular open source wikis and provides a clean syntax for users.

Perform the following to create a wiki page:

1. In your project, click the Wiki tab.
2. Click the New page subtab.
3. Type the Page Name. This value must be alphanumeric with no spaces. You won't be able to change this name later, so be careful.
4. Enter the text and syntax for the page in the Content field. Learn more about the wiki syntax.
5. Click a link in one of the Labels fields to see the available list of labels. Labels help the user determine how relevant the wiki page is to them.
6. Click Preview, Save page, or Discard.

Tracking Project Tasks

The Issues tab is a great way to keep track of the ongoing features, tasks, and bugs in your project. It allows multiple project members to see what others are currently doing.

After you click the New issue subtab to create a new issue, please note the Labels fields. Labels are strings that are meaningful to the project members. When an issue label contains a dash, such as Priority-Medium, it is interpreted as a key-value pair that you can use like a custom field.

• The prefix before the first dash is the key.
• The part after the first dash is the value.

You can configure the issue list to show a column for any prefix. You can also search for the values within a specific custom field by using prefix:value.

Sharing Releases

When you're ready to release your code, you can use the Downloads tab to upload compressed files. Others can then go to this tab on your project to download the code for their own use.

Be sure to choose the file names carefully before you upload them. The file name will become part of your URL, and you cannot change it later. Include a release number in the name of any file that may change in a later release.

While we recommend that you mark old releases as deprecated, you can delete files from the Downloads tab: click on the row for the file name (not the file link) to get to the download details page, then click the 'Delete' link.

Finding Further Help

For general questions, check the FAQ wiki page. If you have a question that still isn't answered, bring it up on the Google Group.

The content on this page created by Google is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. User-generated content is not included in this license.