Bubble.io and Mercurial integration: Step-by-Step Guide 2024

Integration of Mercurial with Bubble.io is actually challenging and far from straightforward as of now. As per our current understanding, there isn't a well-documented method for integrating these two directly.

Mercurial is a free-to-use, distributed source control management tool. While Bubble.io is a tool that allows individuals without coding knowledge to create web applications.

It's important to keep in mind that Bubble.io is a no-code tool with a visual programming interface and tends to manage its own code, and does not natively support code repositories or version control systems like Mercurial. The applications built with Bubble.io might not have their own exposeable codebase, which could be pushed to a version control system.

However, if you're persistent about this and really want to integrate Mercurial with Bubble.io, the rough workaround would be to manually take code from Bubble.io (If any) and manage it using Mercurial. Below are the steps for the workaround:

Step 1: Export your Bubble.io Code

Login to your Bubble.io account and navigate to your application. The app you've created on Bubble.io might have the ability to export some portions of its code (for example to embed into a website or to create a plugin).

Keep in mind, the amount of code that you can export from a Bubble.io app can be very limited, as the majority of the app "code" is represented visually within the Bubble.io platform itself.

Step 2: Set Up an Local Mercurial Repository

Assuming that you have already installed Mercurial on your local machine, make a directory for your project:

mkdir ProjectName
cd ProjectName

Create a new Mercurial repository:

hg init

Step 3: Add Bubble.io Code to the Repository

Take the code that you exported from Bubble.io and add it to the folder you initiated Mercurial on

echo "Bubble.io code" > filename

To let Mercurial know that it should keep track of changes to these files:

hg add

And make an initial commit:

hg commit -m "Initial commit"

Step 4: Continually Update Your Mercurial Repo with Changes from Bubble.io

Since there isn't any direct integration, you would have to manually update your Mercurial repo whenever there are any changes made in your Bubble.io app. This would involve exporting the changed code from Bubble.io, replacing the appropriate files in your local repo, and committing the changes:

hg commit -m "Update with latest changes from Bubble.io"

This method is extremely labor intensive and may not capture the full breadth of your Bubble.io application, since so much of it is stored in a format specific to Bubble.io.

As such, while the workaround described above might work on a very small and limited level, trying to integrate Mercurial with Bubble.io in a meaningful and comprehensive way is currently not feasible due to incompatibility in the way Bubble.io stores and manages its code and how source control management tools like Mercurial function.