help/urls.txt

minor documentation improvements

Valid URLs are of the form::

  local/filesystem/path[#revision]
  file://local/filesystem/path[#revision]
  http://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
  https://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
  ssh://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]

Paths in the local filesystem can either point to Mercurial
repositories or to bundle files (as created by 'hg bundle' or 'hg
incoming --bundle').

An optional identifier after # indicates a particular branch, tag, or
changeset to use from the remote repository. See also 'hg help
revisions'.

Some features, such as pushing to http:// and https:// URLs are only
possible if the feature is explicitly enabled on the remote Mercurial
server.

Some notes about using SSH with Mercurial:

- SSH requires an accessible shell account on the destination machine
  and a copy of hg in the remote path or specified with as remotecmd.
- path is relative to the remote user's home directory by default. Use
  an extra slash at the start of a path to specify an absolute path::

    ssh://example.com//tmp/repository

- Mercurial doesn't use its own compression via SSH; the right thing
  to do is to configure it in your ~/.ssh/config, e.g.::

    Host *.mylocalnetwork.example.com
      Compression no
    Host *
      Compression yes

  Alternatively specify "ssh -C" as your ssh command in your hgrc or
  with the --ssh command line option.

These URLs can all be stored in your hgrc with path aliases under the
[paths] section like so::

  [paths]
  alias1 = URL1
  alias2 = URL2
  ...

You can then use the alias for any command that uses a URL (for
example 'hg pull alias1' will be treated as 'hg pull URL1').

Two path aliases are special because they are used as defaults when
you do not provide the URL to a command:

default:
  When you create a repository with hg clone, the clone command saves
  the location of the source repository as the new repository's
  'default' path. This is then used when you omit path from push- and
  pull-like commands (including incoming and outgoing).

default-push:
  The push command will look for a path named 'default-push', and
  prefer it over 'default' if both are defined.