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Company-wide installation

For company-wide installations, the administrator may install SmartGit on a read-only location or network share or customize the installation process by e.g. using batch files. To set up a custom initial configuration for the users, certain settings files can be prepared and put into a directory named default. For Mac OS X this default directory must be located in SmartGit.app/Contents/Resources/ (parallel to the Java directory), for other operating systems within SmartGit’s installation directory (parallel to the lib and bin directories).

When a user starts SmartGit for the first time, the following files will be copied from the default directory (on the network share) to the user’s personal SmartGit settings directory (refer to Default Location of SmartGit’s Settings Directory):

  • smartgit.properties
  • accelerators.xml
  • credentials.xml
  • hostingProviders.xml
  • repository.xml
  • settings.xml
  • tools.xml
  • ui-config.xml
  • ui-settings.xml

The license file (only for 10+ user Commercial licenses) can also be placed into the default directory. In the latter case, SmartGit will prefill the License field in the Set Up wizard when a user starts SmartGit for the first time. When upgrading SmartGit, this license file will also be used, so users won’t be prompted with a ‘license expired’ message, but can continue working seamlessly.

Note

Be sure to name the license file license in the default directory without any extension. There are a couple of system properties related to SmartGit’s license management. For details, have a look at: System Properties#license.

To preconfigure only a subset of default options to custom values and leave initialization of other defaults to SmartGit, you may provide reduced versions of the settings .xml files in the default directory.

Example

If you want to preconfigure the used Git executable to c:\\path\\to\\your\\preferred\\bin\\git.exe, you may use following settings.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<obj key="Preferences" type="@Preferences" id="_ID_1">
    <obj key="git" type="@GitSettings" id="_ID_2">
        <prop key="gitExe" value="c:\\path\\to\\your\\preferred\\bin\\git.exe" type="String"/>
    </obj>
</obj>

System properties vs. VM options

From a technical perspective, system properties   and VM options are the same thing, they are just specified in different files. System properties are specified in smartgit.properties in the SmartGit’s Settings Directory, VM options are specified in the smartgit.vmoptions file. From an administrative perspective, it’s recommended to configure all system properties in the smartgit.vmoptions file and leave individual user smartgit.properties files untouched.

smartgit.vmoptions is loaded before smartgit.properties and thus properties present in smartgit.vmoptions have precedence over the same properties specified in smartgit.properties. This way, when having a read-only installation of SmartGit you can configure SmartGit in a pretty safe way using smartgit.vmoptions.

Overriding Defaults

By default, the files from the defaults directory will only be copied during the initial setup of the user’s SmartGit installation. In certain scenarios, it may be desirable to replace a configuration even after SmartGit has been set up for a user. For example, the Tools may be managed by the administrator and updated from time to time. User should receive these updates regardless whether their SmartGit is already set up or not. In this case, you can use the VM option smartgit.startup.settingsToReplaceFromDefaults to force overwriting (i.e. to reset) the specified files in the user’s settings directory.

Example

To reset tools.xml on every start, add following line to smartgit.vmoptions:

` -Dsmartgit.startup.settingsToReplaceFromDefaults`=tools.xml

When you are providing initial defaults or specify to overwrite defaults, you usually don’t want the user to change these settings in the Preferences. Therefore, you might want to hide certain Preferences pages, using system properties .