About This Manual
This guide is intended for people responsible for installing, configuring, and maintaining Perforce installations. This guide covers tasks typically performed by a "system administrator" (for instance, installing and configuring the software and ensuring uptime and data integrity), as well as tasks performed by a "Perforce administrator", such as setting up Perforce users, configuring Perforce depot access controls, resetting Perforce user passwords, and so on.
Because Perforce requires no special system permissions, a Perforce administrator does not typically require root-level access. Depending on your site's needs, your Perforce administrator need not be your system administrator.
Both the UNIX and Windows versions of the Perforce service are administered from the command line. To familiarize yourself with the Perforce Command-Line Client, see the P4 Command Reference.
Using Perforce?
If you plan to use Perforce as well as administer a Perforce installation, see the P4 User's Guide for information on Perforce from a user's perspective.
All of our documentation is available from our web site at http://www.perforce.com/documentation.
Replicas, Edge Servers, Brokers, and Proxies
Material on replicas, edge servers, brokers, and proxies can be found in Perforce Server Administrator's Guide: Multi-site Deployment.
Please give us feedback
We are interested in receiving opinions on this manual from our users. In
particular, we'd like to hear from users who have never used Perforce
before. Does this guide teach the topic well? Please let us know what you
think; we can be reached at <[email protected]>.
What's new in this guide for the 2014.2 update
This section provides a list of changes to this guide for the Perforce Server 2014.2 update release. For a list of all new functionality and major bug fixes in Perforce Server 2014.2, see the Perforce Server 2014.2 Release Notes.
Changes in the update
- LDAP authentication
-
The section Authentication options has been expanded to provide better coverage of LDAP authentication.
Major changes
- Book title change
-
The title of this guide has changed from Perforce System Administrator's Guide to Perforce Server Administrator's Guide: Fundamentals.
- LDAP Authentication
-
Users can now be authenticated via LDAP servers. See Authenticating against Active Directory and LDAP servers for details.
- Unicode
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Unicode mode is now the default setting for new servers. The section on Unicode installations has been rewritten and greatly expanded. See Setting up and managing Unicode installations for details.
Minor changes
- Structured logging
-
The section on structured logging has been updated with coverage of the new
serverlog.file.configurable(s). See Logging and structured log files for details.N - Checkpoint integrity verification
-
A pointer to verifying checkpoint integrity was added to Creating a checkpoint, and a description of the checkpoint integrity verification steps is included in To recover the database.
- Monitoring
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The section on process monitoring has been updated with coverage of the different monitoring levels, including the ability to track locked files. See Enabling process monitoring and Showing information about locked files for details.
- Protections
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An example of group exclusionary protections has been added to Granting access to groups of users.
- Lockless reads
-
Further information and clarifications have been added to the discussion of lockless reads in Improving concurrency with lockless reads.
-
%argsQuoted% -
A new trigger variable,
%argsQuoted%, contains a percent-encoded, comma-separated list of arguments to a trigger. See Trigger script variables for details. -
.prefabfiles. -
Unity 3D
.prefabfiles have been added to the list of known filetypes. See Defining filetypes with p4 typemap for details. - Corrections
-
The syntax of the p4 trust command is fixed in Telling Perforce applications which port to connect to.
The unnecessary
journal fileargument has been removed from the checkpoint replay step in Upgrading p4d - between 2013.2 and 2013.3. In the same section, a step to run the necessary database schema update has been added.The syntax of the example
SpecMap:in Controlling which specs are versioned has been corrected.The discussion on tickets now indicates how tickets are created, and that tickets cannot be used in place of a password with the p4 login command. See How ticket-based authentication works for details.
In the discussion of jobspec field datatypes, the number of datatypes has been corrected to six from five. See The Fields: field for details.
Corrected misspellings of STDIN and STDOUT Triggers.
Mentioned that LDAP authentication might be preferable in the discussion of using triggers for external authentication. See Triggers and Triggering to use external authentication for details.
Corrected the spelling of
%P4PORT%in Trigger script variables.Corrected the spelling of the
change-failedtrigger in Trigger definitions and Triggering on submits, and provided further details on the conditions that fire this trigger.Corrected the spelling of
triggers.ioin Communication between a trigger and the server.Corrected where triggers can exist in Triggers.
Corrected the described effect of a trigger failure with
change-submittriggers. See Triggering on submits for details.A mention that
%serverport%can contain a transport prefix was missing, and is now included in Writing triggers to support multiple Perforce servers.