view mercurial/help/urls.txt @ 32005:2406dbba49bd

serve: add support for Mercurial subrepositories

I've been using `hg serve --web-conf ...` with a simple '/=projects/**' [paths]
configuration for awhile without issue.  Let's ditch the need for the manual
configuration in this case, and limit the repos served to the actual subrepos.

This doesn't attempt to handle the case where a new subrepo appears while the
server is running.  That could probably be handled with a hook if somebody wants
it.  But it's such a rare case, it probably doesn't matter for the temporary
serves.

The main repo is served at '/', just like a repository without subrepos.  I'm
not sure why the duplicate 'adding ...' lines appear on Linux.  They don't
appear on Windows (see 594dd384803c), so they are optional.

Subrepositories that are configured with '../path' or absolute paths are not
cloneable from the server.  (They aren't cloneable locally either, unless they
also exist at their configured source, perhaps via the share extension.)  They
are still served, so that they can be browsed, or cloned individually.  If we
care about that cloning someday, we can probably just add the extra entries to
the webconf dictionary.  Even if the entries use '../' to escape the root, only
the related subrepositories would end up in the dictionary.

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@]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`). See also :hg:`help paths`.

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.

Note that the security of HTTPS URLs depends on proper configuration of
web.cacerts.

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
  configuration file or with the --ssh command line option.

These URLs can all be stored in your configuration file 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.