mercurial/help/hgweb.txt

internals: refactor wire protocol documentation

Upcoming work will introduce a new version of the HTTP and SSH
transports. The differences will be significant enough to consider
them new transports. So, we now attach a version number to each
transport.

In addition, having the handshake documented after the transport
and in a single shared section made it harder to follow the flow
of the connection. The handshake documentation is now moved to the
protocol section it describes. We now have a generic section about
the purpose of the handshake, which was rewritten significantly.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2060

Mercurial's internal web server, hgweb, can serve either a single
repository, or a tree of repositories. In the second case, repository
paths and global options can be defined using a dedicated
configuration file common to :hg:`serve`, ``hgweb.wsgi``,
``hgweb.cgi`` and ``hgweb.fcgi``.

This file uses the same syntax as other Mercurial configuration files
but recognizes only the following sections:

  - web
  - paths
  - collections

The ``web`` options are thoroughly described in :hg:`help config`.

The ``paths`` section maps URL paths to paths of repositories in the
filesystem. hgweb will not expose the filesystem directly - only
Mercurial repositories can be published and only according to the
configuration.

The left hand side is the path in the URL. Note that hgweb reserves
subpaths like ``rev`` or ``file``, try using different names for
nested repositories to avoid confusing effects.

The right hand side is the path in the filesystem. If the specified
path ends with ``*`` or ``**`` the filesystem will be searched
recursively for repositories below that point.
With ``*`` it will not recurse into the repositories it finds (except for
``.hg/patches``).
With ``**`` it will also search inside repository working directories
and possibly find subrepositories.

In this example::

  [paths]
  /projects/a = /srv/tmprepos/a
  /projects/b = c:/repos/b
  / = /srv/repos/*
  /user/bob = /home/bob/repos/**

- The first two entries make two repositories in different directories
  appear under the same directory in the web interface
- The third entry will publish every Mercurial repository found in
  ``/srv/repos/``, for instance the repository ``/srv/repos/quux/``
  will appear as ``http://server/quux/``
- The fourth entry will publish both ``http://server/user/bob/quux/``
  and ``http://server/user/bob/quux/testsubrepo/``

The ``collections`` section is deprecated and has been superseded by
``paths``.

URLs and Common Arguments
=========================

URLs under each repository have the form ``/{command}[/{arguments}]``
where ``{command}`` represents the name of a command or handler and
``{arguments}`` represents any number of additional URL parameters
to that command.

The web server has a default style associated with it. Styles map to
a collection of named templates. Each template is used to render a
specific piece of data, such as a changeset or diff.

The style for the current request can be overwritten two ways. First,
if ``{command}`` contains a hyphen (``-``), the text before the hyphen
defines the style. For example, ``/atom-log`` will render the ``log``
command handler with the ``atom`` style. The second way to set the
style is with the ``style`` query string argument. For example,
``/log?style=atom``. The hyphenated URL parameter is preferred.

Not all templates are available for all styles. Attempting to use
a style that doesn't have all templates defined may result in an error
rendering the page.

Many commands take a ``{revision}`` URL parameter. This defines the
changeset to operate on. This is commonly specified as the short,
12 digit hexadecimal abbreviation for the full 40 character unique
revision identifier. However, any value described by
:hg:`help revisions` typically works.

Commands and URLs
=================

The following web commands and their URLs are available:

  .. webcommandsmarker