Chnrxn – The Chain Reaction

The Mercurial wiki already covers how to serve a Mercurial repository using Apache and mod_wsgi, which take quite a number of steps ranging from downloading, compiling and installing mod_wsgi (if it is not available for your platform) to making arcane Apache configurations.

Here’s how to serve any number of Mercurial repositories using a few lines of Python code and a WSGI web server. Rocket is a WSGI server written in Python. It is the internal web server being used by the Web2Py project.

Install rocket into your Python installation with

easy_install -U rocket

or simply download the standalone script and extract it into the current directory.

Copy and paste the below segment of code into a filename of your choosing into the same directory as the rocket.py script as extracted above. You only need to change the first line containing repoconf to point to an actual file with the repository information. You only need ONE repoconf line.

repoconf = 'c:/documents and settings/user/repo.ini' # in Windows
repoconf = '/home/user/repo.cfg' # in Linux/Unix

from rocket import Rocket
from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()
from mercurial.hgweb.hgwebdir_mod import hgwebdir

Rocket(
    ('127.0.0.1', 80),
    'wsgi',
    {
        "wsgi_app":hgwebdir(repoconf)
    }
).start()

Example of the repoconf file can be found in here. It is referred to as the hgweb.config file, but regardless of what the name is, it is the file path that needs to be passed to the hgwebdir() function/constructor.

As of Mercurial 1.8.2, quotes are not needed in the hgweb.config file. Spaces and backslashes in the path are also OK.

Remember these are actual strings read from a config file, not strings in Python representation!

[paths]
repo1 = /path/to/unix/location
repo2 = c:/documents and settings/username/repo # no quotes needed, spaces are OK!
repo3 = c:\documents and settings\username\repo # back slash also ok!
repo4 = "c:/documents and settings/username/repo" # with quotes => wrong!!