Easy way to serve mercurial?

Question

I am currently using TortoiseHg on windows. I want my server to be available automatically as it is switched on.

But I need to do these:

1. when I set up a new project, I need to enter the localdir=URL pairs under the [web] each time I set up a project.
2. I need to run the hg serve or the Tortoise frontend each time to get it 'up'.

I saw many tutorials for setting up Apache as the server. I want something that can be deployed faster. I also saw some web frontends of questionable stability.

Is there mature and easy-to-use software with push and pull capability, which serves all repos in a given folder? Something that starts/stops without user intervention and can be easily set up?

Or should I stick with setting up Apache to do it?

Answer 1

To achieve this I use RhodeCode : http://rhodecode.org/

It works like a simplified private bitbucket.

That way I have my repositories (gathered in a folder as you asked) online on a private server, I can manage access easily.

Once setup and running it should solve your problem.

Answer 2

hg itself comes with a basic web server functionality: hgwebcgi I believe it's called (or used to be called).

I use it myself somewhat.

I prefer to use bitbucket tho.

Answer 3

In a windows environment, we usually just stored our shared mercurial repositories on shared network drives. We always had our company shared server (S drive) mapped anyway, so cloning from there to our local drive worked fine. While we were on the work network we could then push/pull normally.

^{Note, there is an issue with the current version of TortoiseHG which means that it has problems with samba (windows shares), so it's probably best to stick with thg-2.0.5 if you use repos on shared drives, until 2.1.2 is released.}

If you need access to the shared repository from off site, you may want to look into private repositories with bitbucket. I haven't used them myself, but others have suggested it is a good option.

^{Note, it's a bit out of date now, but there are some useful pointers to hosted mercurial repositories in a StackOverflow question of mine.}