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 .

What's new in this guide for the 2015.1 release

This section provides a list of changes to this guide for the Perforce Server 2015.1 release. For a list of all new functionality and major bug fixes in Perforce Server 2015.1, see the Perforce Server 2014.2 Release Notes.

Major changes

LDAP Authentication

Expanded section on LDAP authentication to include Active Directory examples, to discuss the use of the auth.ldap.userautocreate configurable, and to explain how to work with LDAP groups. For more information, see Authentication options.

Synchronizing LDAP groups

Updated information to explain how to synchronize Perforce and LDAP groups. See Synchronizing Perforce groups with LDAP groups.

Minor changes

The effect of p4 verify

Corrected doc to say that the p4 verify command in the backup process does not update checksum or file length information.

Locking behavior after a failed submit

Noted the effect of a failed submit on file locking. See Triggering on submits for information.

The use of command triggers with P4 push and P4 fetch

Noted the use of command triggers with the p4 push and p4 fetch commands. See Triggering before or after commands .