Practical Perforce

Appendix A. Setting Up a Perforce Test Environment

This book is not a tutorial—there are no exercises to follow, no drills to complete, and no working sample programs to run. But if your interest is piqued as you read along, you may want to try a few things yourself. You’ll be happy to know that it takes about 10 minutes to set up a Perforce test environment, complete with server.

There are caveats, however:

• Although You don’t need a Perforce license to run a Perforce Server, an unlicensed server will support only two users and five workspaces.

• The quick setup steps described here are no substitute for a well-informed Perforce installation procedure. If you want to set up a Perforce Server for production use, please follow the instructions in the The Perforce System Administrator’s Guide.

• Perforce installation procedures vary slightly from release to release. The procedures described here are based on Perforce Release 2005.1.

Setup

You should plan to download and install, at a minimum, P4, the Perforce Command-Line Client, and P4D, the Perforce Server. You should also install P4V, the Perforce Visual Client, and P4Web, the Perforce Web Client, as both come up occasionally in examples in this book.

You can run the Perforce Server on the same machine you’ll be using to run your client programs. Or, if you prefer, you can use the client programs on one machine while running the server on another. In either case, make sure you download and install the software matches the machines ...