A tour of p4-web, from login to submit — and the corners past it: search, and the metadata browsers. If you haven't installed it yet, the quickstart gets a server running in under a minute.
All screenshots show a demo depot (//rocket)
with fictional users and changelists — your instance will show your own
server's data, filtered by your Perforce protections.
Credentials are exchanged for a p4 login
ticket — the password itself is never stored. If your site uses
long-lived tickets, you can paste a ticket value in place of the
password, Swarm-style. The server address shown under the logo is the
instance's P4PORT.
The collapsible tree on the left stays in sync with deep links, P4V-style. Listings show revision, changelist, type and modified time — click a column header to sort. The ☆ button saves the current path as a favorite; favorites become a dashboard on the root page. Directories with a README render it below the listing.
Syntax highlighting works offline (vendored highlight.js). The revision dropdown re-renders the file at any revision; Raw and Download serve the exact bytes. Click a line number to copy a permalink or start an inline comment thread. Markdown files get a Rendered/Source toggle.
The Annotate tab shows the changelist and author that last touched every line — click through to the full change. The slider in the header is a time-lapse: drag it to re-blame the file as it stood at any earlier revision.
Unified and side-by-side views everywhere a diff appears; the toggle remembers your preference. Pick arbitrary revision pairs from the History tab — or compare whole directory trees, which is the next step.
Folder diff (under More, or the button on any directory) takes two depot paths and reports what differs across them: files that changed on both sides, files that exist on only one, and type changes. Either side may carry an @change or @date suffix, so the same path compared against its own past answers “what has this directory done since the release?” Every differing row links straight to the file diff.
Filter submitted or pending changelists by user, path, description text, or date range — and submitted ones by filename too. Description and filename search run against a per-user local index (the ⚡ bar) that respects your protections and updates incrementally, so searches over thousands of changes come back instantly. The page itself appears at once: the filters never wait on the index.
Open any change number to get the full description, its jobs, and every file it touched. Each edited file has a disclosure triangle that expands the diff inline — unified or side-by-side, without leaving the page — and pending changelists show their shelved files against the base revision. At the bottom, a comment thread hangs off the changelist itself: markdown bodies, one level of replies, resolve when the point is settled.
Every line of every diff carries its own anchor: hover a
line, hit the speech bubble in the gutter, and a thread opens under it —
markdown body, one level of replies, resolve when the point is settled.
Lines that already carry threads show the count, so you can see at a
glance where the conversation is. A thread opened inside a changelist's
diff is the same thread you see on the file's own page, and typing
@name pulls up your colleagues and puts the comment in
their mentions.
Shelve a changelist, then mark it in review,
approved, or needs work from its page. The state is the
app's, not Perforce's — nothing about your changelist changes — and every
move is logged with who made it and an optional note, so “approved”
always says approved by whom. Anyone who can see the change can move it.
The Reviews page under More is the queue; the
@ badge in the top bar is your own: comments that named you,
newest first, cleared when you read them.
My Changes is your personal pending-changelist page, backed by a server-side workspace created on demand. From any file page, Edit or Delete opens the file into a changelist; here you can:
You can only touch your own p4-web changelists, and every write is recorded in an audit log.
The box in the top bar searches two ways. Files matches substrings of depot paths across every depot (wildcards * and ... allowed). Content greps inside the files themselves — it needs a scope path, because grepping an entire server is a good way to melt it. Content matches come back grouped by file, and every line links straight to that line in the viewer.
Labels with their tagged files, jobs with the fixes that closed them, branch mappings, streams with their parents, and users & groups — the P4V metadata browsers, one menu away. Folder diff (step 6) lives here too.
Stats answers the questions a list of changelists can’t: how busy is this depot lately, which areas are moving, and who is submitting. Switch the time axis between day, week, month and year; step the path chart deeper or click a bar to drill into that directory; click an account to see only theirs. The three charts share one filter set, so narrowing any of them narrows the rest — and clicking a bar hands that exact slice to the Changes list. Numbers come from the same local index that makes changelist search fast, built with your own Perforce ticket, so they only ever count what you are allowed to see.
The gear in the top bar opens Settings. Reviews, comments, mentions, write operations, favorites, stats and the fast changelist index can each be turned off — the switches are stored with your account, so they follow you to any browser, while theme and diff layout stay per device. Whoever runs the server can turn a feature off for everyone, in which case its row here says so and stays put. Nothing is deleted either way: switch a feature back on and everything written while it was on is where you left it.
