annotate mercurial/help/hgweb.txt @ 17104:5a9acb0b2086

help: improve hgweb help

The existing help only walked through an example.

Now we first explain the basic rules and then show an example.

The 'collections' example and description only cause confusion and is removed.

Bikeshedded by Patrick Mezard <[e-mail]>

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 thorougly 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 superseeded by
``paths``.