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P4 Server Administration Documentation | 2026.1

# Initializing a server

This section describes how to start up a personal server, presenting two different approaches.

1. The first approach initializes an empty server. Choose this if you want to work in isolation on a personal server, developing and possibly branching code, and versioning locally. See Run p4 init.
2. The second approach copies content from another (shared) server to populate the newly initialized server with files and history; this is known as cloning. This approach is best when working collectively on an existing project; users work on a set of project files that are managed on a shared server. The users make changes to the files on their personal server and then push the changes to a shared server, which then makes these changes available to other project users. At any given time, users can fetch the latest content from the shared server. See Run p4 clone.

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