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P4 Server Administration Documentation | 2026.1

# Streams and branching

A stream is a special branch that has hierarchy and policy. To learn about the types of streams, see "Stream depots" in the P4 CLI Documentation.

When using a personal server created by `p4 init` or `p4 clone`, P4 Server uses streams as containers for your code. P4 Server will create a stream named `main` to contain the content created or cloned. If, in working with your personal server, you need to create new streams, use the `p4 switch` command. You can then use merge and copy to move individual changes between streams.

If you clone using a remote that maps stream paths, you don't get the stream structure of the shared server. Instead, the parent and children structure is flattened to mainline streams. Any creation of the stream structure on the local DVCS server is a manual process.

Although you can switch between streams on a shared server, you cannot use `p4 switch` to create new streams on shared servers.

DVCS does not support task streams.

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