Get started with Trunk in under 3 minutes
How to get started with Trunk’s new version control system for designers.
Trunk is a lightweight tool for designers and design teams to manage their design files through secure version control. Trunk currently supports both Sketch & Photoshop files with support for more file types coming soon.
Getting Started
The first step to starting with Trunk is to sign up and download the Trunk desktop client. To do this sign up to Trunk — it’s free! 🎉
Once signed up you will need to download the desktop client and sign in.
The Trunk design workflow
Trunk is setup to give you powerful version control features like version history, branching, reverting file versions and handling merge conflicts straight out of the box.
We recommend when you first log in to Trunk to set your default project location. This can be set under: Settings > Project settings > Default project location.
Trunk’s approach is to give every designer powerful version control features, without getting in the way of their day to day workflow. To use Trunk, all you need to do is have the Trunk desktop app running in the background as you work in Photoshop & Sketch.
Every time you hit save in Sketch or Photoshop, Trunk will automatically branch your changes keeping these private to you.
Once your happy with your design changes, you simply ‘Finish changes’ which merges your work to the Master branch for your entire team to see.
Files saved in Trunk are backed up daily to the Trunk cloud. These files are highly secure and encrypted to ensure that your data is safe.
Let’s setup a team.
To do this click on ‘View projects’ from the welcome screen above and then click the + in the left hand side navigation.
Teams are similar to that in Slack in that you can group projects so that they sit seperate to each other and to your personal projects.
Adding team members
After creating a project, you will be prompted to add team members. You can of course do this later, but in this case we will invite a couple of co-workers to our Trunk team.
Projects
Once you have created your project and added team members, you need to create a project. This should be pretty self explanatory, just hit the ‘New Project’ button.
In Trunk you can have multiple files under the one project. This keeps things nice and organised for your team. No more searching for files! 👌
You will have the choice to make your project private or public. Public projects will show in search results, private projects are completely private to you and your team.
You can simply drag and drop a file (or manually import). This is where the cool stuff happens. The file is copied your Trunk project directory: (by default this directory is /user/trunk), which can be changed under Settings > Project Settings.
You will immediately see that Trunk has created a list of Pages and Art boards that represent your file. Trunk is now tracking any changes you make to the file.
When you make changes in sketch & Photoshop and hit save, Trunk automatically creates a new branch for you to work on. Anyone on your team cannot see your changes until you have finished your changes (merged to Master).
Let’s finish your changes.
Ok we will click on the tick to finish the changes. Nice work!
As you can see the changes are now on Master. Your team members will receive an email notifying them of these changes that you have made.
Compare
As you work you may want to compare changes made to previous changes or those made from another team member.
Simply click on an art board within a project. If there were previous changes you can compare by toggling the compare modes.
Roll back versions
Not happy with a version. Choose a previous version from the history on the right and click those three little dots next to the ‘Edit in …’ button. You will see an option to ‘Revert to this version’.
Well that wraps it up!
This covers the core features of Trunk. In the next article we will look at how to manage merge conflicts.
We only launched Trunk just over 3 weeks ago. We’d love your feedback on our approach to automated version control for designers.
Cheers,
Elliott
Co-founder @ Trunk
