mercurial-server: Persuading mercurial-server to work on Windows

A few years back, needing decent authentication and key management for Mercurial repositories, we wrote mercurial-server. Recently, we were in the position of wanting to use this with one of our clients, but this time it would need to run under Windows. This was a bit of a problem as it was designed for a Unix-type environment. On the other hand, it’s mostly written in Python, and we could use Cygwin, so how bad could it be?

As it turns out, not too awful. I needed to make a few small modifications, and we’ve now managed to deploy a working mercurial-server under Windows. (more…)

mercurial-server: mercurial-server needs a long-term Debian sponsor

Thanks to the patient work of Jakub Wilk, mercurial-server 1.2-1 has hit the Debian “unstable” repository, where all being well it should make its way into testing, stable, Ubuntu and so forth. Jakub stepped in at the last minute when I discovered that the project’s previous sponsor, Steve Kemp, had resigned as a Debian developer in April.

I’d like to arrange a longer-term Debian sponsor for mercurial-server now, in advance of the next release, so that we can make sure we fix any issues with the package in advance and we’re ready when release time comes. If there are any Debian developers out there who use mercurial-server, please do get in touch – thanks!

mercurial-server: mercurial-server 1.2 released

Version 1.2 of mercurial-server is now available. This fixes a security problem, adds compatibility with Mercurial 1.9 and fixes incompatibilities with older versions of Python, adds MQ compatibility, and some other minor things.

Unfortunately it may not immediately enter Debian, because my former sponsor is no longer a Debian developer. If you’re an official Debian developer and you’d like to sponsor this package, please get in touch – thanks!

mercurial-server on mentors.debian.net.

mercurial-server: mercurial-server version 1.1 released

Version 1.1 of mercurial-server is now available. This permits one repository to be in a subdirectory of another, which makes subrepositories more convenient, as well as improvements to logging and documentation. I’ve also included the collection of scripts I use for testing under the “dev” subdirectory in the main repository, though I’d want to clean these up somewhat before including them in the release tarballs.

The Debian version also includes fixes for all the outstanding bugs against it in Debian; I’ve sent the files off to the sponsor, so hopefully that’ll enter Debian testing soon.

mercurial-server: Publishing your mercurial-server repositories to the Web

I got a couple of queries recently on how to make your mercurial-server repositories publically readable over HTTP. Happily this isn’t hard to do, and doesn’t really touch on mercurial-server itself. Here’s how we do it on our Debian systems; in what follows I assume that you have installed mercurial-server on hg.example.com, and that you’re not already using that machine as a web server for anything else. First install these packages; note that they tend to have a lot of stuff you don’t need marked as recommended, so don’t install those things:

apt-get --no-install-recommends install apache2 libapache2-mod-fcgid python-flup

Create the following four files:

/etc/mercurial-server/hgweb.config:

[collections]
/var/lib/mercurial-server/repos = /var/lib/mercurial-server/repos

/etc/mercurial-server/hgweb.hgrc:

[web]
style = gitweb
allow_archive = bz2 gz zip
baseurl = http://hg.example.com/
maxchanges = 200

/etc/mercurial-server/hgwebdir.fcgi:

!/usr/bin/env python

from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()

import os
os.environ["HGENCODING"] = "UTF-8"
os.environ["HGRCPATH"] = "/etc/mercurial-server/hgweb.hgrc"

from mercurial.hgweb.hgwebdir_mod import hgwebdir
from mercurial.hgweb.request import wsgiapplication
from flup.server.fcgi import WSGIServer

def makewebapp():
    return hgwebdir("/etc/mercurial-server/hgweb.config")

WSGIServer(wsgiapplication(makewebapp)).run()

/etc/apache2/sites-available/hg:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName hg.example.com
    AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
    ScriptAlias / /etc/mercurial-server/hgwebdir.fcgi/
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/hg/error.log
    LogLevel warn
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/hg/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Finally run these commands as root:

chmod +x /etc/mercurial-server/hgwebdir.fcgi
mkdir -p /var/log/apache2/hg
cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
rm 000-default
ln -s ../sites-available/hg
/etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Your files should now be served at http://hg.example.com/ . Sadly because of a design flaw in hgwebdir, there’s no easy way to get Apache to handle the static files it needs, but these are pretty small so there’s no harm in letting hgwebdir handle them. The “rm 000-default” thing seems pretty undesirable, but without it I can’t seem to get this recipe to work.

I’ve chosen FastCGI as the connector. This has the advantage that

• unlike CGI, it doesn’t fork a new handler on every request
• unlike mod_python, it keeps your Mercurial handler separate from your web server
• unlike SCGI, it will automatically start the service for you if it’s not already running, which is a massive convenience

I’m not aware of any other way of working that offers all three advantages.

As soon as a version of lighttpd with this bug fixed makes it into Debian, I’ll add my recipe for that.

mercurial-server: Getting into Debian

mercurial-server is an official Debian package! Right now it’s only in the “unstable” distribution, but all being well it will slowly percolate forward, first into “testing”, then eventually into the stable distributions of not only Debian but Ubuntu and other Debian-based systems.

Getting it into Debian was quite a long and strange process; the care that Debian takes over package quality puts quite a burden on individual developers in order to minimize the burden on overworked Debian staff. I’ll talk through the steps I took here, eliding over any wrong turns of course, in the hope that the way I did it might be useful to others. (more…)

mercurial-server: mercurial-server 0.8 released

mercurial-server home page

mercurial-server gives your developers remote read/write access to centralized Mercurial repositories using SSH public key authentication; it provides convenient and fine-grained key management and access control.

(more…)