What is Bazaar?

Bazaar is a distributed version control system that Just Works and adapts to the workflows you want to use. Bazaar is:

Friendly. Distributed version control doesn't need to be complex. Bazaar is Version Control for Human Beings. Bazaar has a natural feel because we focus on usability, particularly task efficiency.

Smart. Bazaar has perfect support for renaming files AND directories. This means developers can refactor without holding back because of fear of merging. It also means you can unleash your community and merge efficiently even from contributors who are radically restructuring the tree.

Fast. Almost every open source project can get the advanced features of Bazaar without slowing down its developers. See our impressive benchmark results across a wide range of open source projects.

Efficient. Bazaar's default storage format is highly efficient, better than its main competitors in most cases. See our disk space benchmarks for examples.

Lightweight. No dedicated server with Bazaar installed is needed, just FTP access to a web server. A smart server is available for those requiring additional performance or security but it is not required in many cases - Bazaar 1.x over plain http performs well.

Just a tool. Bazaar can play a key role in helping you get from great idea to running code in the hands of end users. Tools are only part of the puzzle though so our documentation explicitly sets out to make you productive, explaining how to use Bazaar effectively, presenting best practices and insightful tips.

Extensible. Bazaar is designed as a Python API with a plugin system, so it is easy to embed in your tools and projects and easy to extend or integrate with existing infrastructure. Integration via XML is supported by a plugin. Whether you are a single user keeping track of configuration files or a team of 100s of people on multiple continents, Bazaar is a great choice.

Embeddable. A key design feature of Bazaar is support from the ground up for pluggable storage formats. One size does not fit all, particularly when new application delivery platforms - like the OLPC, iPod and Amazon's S3 - have different characteristics to traditional filesystems. If you want intelligent version control embedded into your application or content management system, Bazaar has the architecture you need.

Safe. Bazaar is backed by a thriving open source community and sponsored by Canonical, one of the fastest growing open source companies around. The development process follows best practices with code review of all core and community changes. Bazaar has a huge test suite (over 10,000 tests) that ensures that new features can be rapidly added without breaking existing ones. We are rapidly building the world's best VCS, delivering several dozen improvements to our adopters each and every month.

Free. Bazaar is available under the GPL v2 or later. If you want to embed Bazaar into your products under a different license, please contact us.

Bazaar runs on GNU/Linux, UNIX, Windows and OS X out of the box. For more information, see:

Why Choose Bazaar?

Who Uses Bazaar?

Bazaar Features

How do I use it?

Here is a sample of Bazaar's documentation:

Bazaar User Guide - the place to start

Bazaar in five minutes - a mini tutorial

Bazaar Migration Guide - tips on migrating project files from other VCS tools to Bazaar

How can I get help?

Our primary page for getting help is the Community link in the header of this Wiki.

How can I contribute?

If you want to get involved, consider reporting a bug, writing a plugin, working on high priority features, blogging about Bazaar or telling your friends. Our primary development wiki page is BzrDevelopment.

You are also welcome to improve this wiki site. To edit pages, please register. Anonymous editing is disabled to prevent spammer attacks. [url]http://bazaar-vcs.org//url][