I would like to have a central repository in a directory on my local computer without setting up a server.
Context: I am working with my boss on a local server inside our LAN. We both are using a vnc connection onto the server, and are doing our work there for simplicity reasons. I would like to set it up so that I can have a copy of my scripts for development, and then when I get to a release, I will push it to a different directory that my boss can then run them from (or even better pull from to his own set and run from there).
I read that you can create a hg server by running 'hg serve', but I do not want to open it up to the LAN, because I don't want it to be accessible.
I tried running 'hg push /home/source' and it gave me an error.
I then ran 'hg init' while in that directory and tried again. It looked like it worked, and then didn't show any files in the directory. I ran status and it showed nothing, and then ran log and it showed the commits.
... without setting up a server
One way I've used to share a "central" Mercurial repository without having to deal with any "server" issues is to have the "central" repository in a folder on Dropbox.
For example, suppose:
your repository is named "repo" and that your "private" copy is in ~/repo
your Dropbox directory on your computer is ~/Dropbox/
Then:
cd ~/Dropbox
hg clone ~/repo
Now suppose you make some changes in ~/repo. You can then "push" them from ~/repo to ~/Dropbox/repo, or (more easily, as explained below) "pull" them into ~/Dropbox/repo when you're ready.
To make updating the "central" repository convenient, you might like to create a script such as:
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/Dropbox/repo
hg tip
hg pull -u
hg tip
Notice that in the script, there is no need to specify the source from which to pull; the hgrc file that's created when you created the clone keeps track of that. (Thank you, hg.)
If your colleague has direct access to a folder on your computer, then you could still adopt the strategy described above, without using Dropbox.
Needless to say, there are many variations.
Needless to say also, if more than one person attempts to commit changes to the shared folder, chaos can easily ensue.
Related
I created a mercurial repository on some file servers net share.
Is it possible to automatically get the remote repository updated to tip if somebody pushes its changes?
Because some other people (purely users) may copy the repositories content (rather than cloning, because of lack of .hg) and i want them to get the newest version.
Since it is a share on a simple NAS it would be good if the pushing client could invoke this update.
It seems that a hook on the changegroup event can solve this.
Add the following lines to the repository's configuration file (repo/.hg/hgrc)
[hooks]
changegroup = hg update
This solution was suggested on a slightly different question:
Cloning mercurial repo to the remote host
At least under windows this seems only to work on local repositories. The reason for this is, that hg tries run a cmd on the remote path that fails, since it does not support UNC paths as current direcory.
Adding explicitly the repository url fixes this, but its not client independent anymore.
[hooks]
changegroup = hg update -R %HG_URL%
You could treat the server repository as your "local working directory" and then PULL from your own PC to that location. If you use hg pull --update then it will automatically update the working folder to the latest.
One way to do this is to login to your NAS and physically run the hg command line program there. If not, you could also mount the NAS folder on your local PC and then chdir to its mapped local folder and use your local hg client to do so.
This might seem like an odd thing to do but Mercurial doesn't care which is the "clone" and which is the "server", you can swap them interchangeably in your workflow.
I need to control the version of a few files accessible via an SMB share. These files will be modified by several people. The files themselves are directly used by a web server.
Since these are production files I wanted to force the users to pull a local copy, edit them, commit and push them back. Unfortunately there is no Mercurial server on that machine.
What would be the appropriate way to configure Mercurial on my side so that:
the versioning (.hg directory) is kept on the share
and that the files on the share are at the latest version?
I do not have access to this server (other than via the share). If I could have a mercurial server on that machine I would have used a hook to update the files in the production directory (I am saying this just to highlight what I want to achieve - this approach is not possible as I do not control that server)
Thanks!
UPDATE: I ended up using an intermediate server (which I have control over). A hook on changegroup triggers a script which i) hg update to have fresh local files ii) copies them to the SMB share
EDIT 1 Following discussions in comments with alex I have looked at the verbose version of the command line output. The \\srv\hg\test1 repo has a [hooks] section with changegroup = hg update. The output from a hg push -v gives some insights:
pushing to \\srv\hg\test1
query 1; heads
(...)
updating the branch cache
running hook changegroup: hg update
'\\srv\hg\test1'
CMD.EXE was started with the above path as the current directory.
UNC paths are not supported. Defaulting to Windows directory.
abort: no repository found in 'C:\Windows' (.hg not found)!
warning: changegroup hook exited with status 255
checking for updated bookmarks
listing keys for "bookmarks"
If I understand correctly the output above:
a cmd.exe was triggered on the client, even though the [hook] was on the receiving server
it tried to update the remote repo
... but failed because UNC are not supported
So alex's answer was correct - it just does not work (yet?) on MS Windows. (Alex please correct me in the comments if I am wrong)
If I understood correctly, you are looking for two things:
A repository hook that will automatically update the production repo to the latest version whenever someone pushes to it. This is simple: You're looking for the answer to this question.
If you can rely on your co-workers to always go through the pull-commit-push process, you're done. If that's not the case, you need a way to prevent people from modifying the production files in place and never committing them.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can selectively withhold write permissions to the checked-out files (but not to the repo) on an SMB share. But you could discourage direct modification by making the location of the files less obvious. Perhaps you could direct people to a second repository, configured so that everything pushed to it is immediately pushed on to the production repository. This repo need not have a checked-out version of the files at all (create it with hg clone -U, or do an hg update -r 0 afterwards), eliminating the temptation to bypass mercurial.
What prevents you from mount your Samba share and run hg init there? You don't need mercurial server (hg serve or more sophisticated things) to perform push/pull operations.
I use Mercurial on desktops, and then push local repositories to a centralized server. I noticed that this remote server does not hold local copies of files in its repositories (the directory is empty, except obviously for the .hg one).
What is the preferred way to populate these directories with local copies? (which in turn are used by various unrelated services on that server).
What I came up so far is to use a hook and hg archive to create a local copy. This would be a satisfactory solution but I need to configure a per-repository hgrc file (which is tedious but I did not find a way to centralize this in /etc/mercurial/hgrc). Maybe a global script (in /etc/mercurial/hgrc, run for each changegroup event)? (in that case how can I get the repository name to use in a if...then scenario?)
If you can get access to the remote repository, you could install a hook for when changegroups come in, and perform an hg update when that happens.
A quick check shows this in the FAQ (question 4.21), but to summarize/duplicate: edit the .hg/hgrc file on the remote repository, and add the following lines:
[hooks]
changegroup = hg update
Whenever the remote repository gets pushed to (or when it performs a pull), it will update to the latest changeset.
Some caveats - this may fail if any changes have been made to the files on the remote side (you could use hg update -C instead). Also, if you have pushed any anonymous branches (which you would have to consciously force), you may not update to what you want to update to.
I have a website that I want to deploy to a clients DEV and UAT environments, the site is part of a mercurial repo - it is in the Website folder at the same level as the .hg folder. I know I can push the entire repository but would rather push only the website folder so the client does not have the other files and folders.
The repo looks like this:
Project root
.hg
Database (SQL Source Control uses this)
Documentation (All specs, pdfs, art work etc.)
Lib (pre-Nuget 3rd party dlls)
packages (Nuget stuff)
Website (this is the only area I want to deploy)
.hgignore
Project.sln
Edit:
The clients servers are not connected directly to the internet, my access to them is over a vpn and then RDP. Currently to deploy any changes I need to zip the site up, put it on a shared ftp server then wait up to 3 days for the files to be copied to the servers. Rules have been configured so I can use Mercurial over this connection.
Edit 2
I have managed to create a subrepo from the Website folder by forgetting the Website folder and all it's contents, committing the change then putting the files back, creating a repo then echoing out the .hgsub file. Locally this works for me, I can clone from the Website repo without getting any of the additional folders. However I have not been able to use this version of the repo, even if I repeat the process on our repo server. When I try to clone the hosted version down to my local working copy I get 404 errors, but I can clone the hosted version on the hosting server.
I would appreciate some step-by-step instructions (a guide for dummies if you like) on how to achive my goal; which is to be able to push only the Website folder to the clients servers. The master copy of the repo is on our repo server, I have a local clone and need to be able to push out versions from my copy.
Edit 3
Turns out that the problem I was having converting a folder to a subrepo as described in http://mercurial.aragost.com/kick-start/en/subrepositories/#converting-folder-into-a-subrepository was that the convert command, in versions after 2.1.0, is broken and is still broken in 2.3.1. After I figured that out and rolled back to that version of TortoiseHg I was able to convert the folder to a subrepo, in the root of the repo I have .hgsub which says Website = Website. I was able to work with that locally, commit to the whole repo, the subrepo, clone either the full repo or the subrepo (which is what I want), however I can't get this to work from our master repo server.
I zipped the whole thing up and ftp'd it to our remote master repo server, then set it up so I could clone from it. Directly on the server this works fine (hg clone --verbose -- C:\Repositories\EM .), however when I try to clone from the server to my local development machine with (hg clone --verbose -- https://myserver.com/hg/EM/ .) it fails with "HTTP Error: 404 (Not Found)".
requesting all changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 628 changesets with 6002 changes to 4326 files
updating to branch default
resolving manifests
calling hook preupdate.eol: <function preupdate at 0x00000000035204A8>
getting .hgignore
getting .hgsub
getting .hgsubstate
HTTP Error: 404 (Not Found)
[command returned code 255 Fri Apr 20 10:51:23 2012]
I don't know what the problem is, the files are there so why the 404?
In my opinion Mercurial shouldn't be used for this purpose. This is particularly true if that website is a web application because you shouldn't have the DLLs in Mercurial.
You should look at the web deployment tool built into Visual Studio. Have a look at this page to see if it suits your purpose.
If you can't install the required services on the destination server then it can be configured to use FTP instead.
You can not push part of repo tree
If DEV and UAT environments are unversioned targets, you can use any other way for distributing Mercurial content
You can separate Website into subrepo and will be able to push this repo
As others have pointed out you can't use push for this. Just do 'rsync' from your server to theirs. You could even automated that in a hook, where you push to a local repository and it auto-deploys to their site. Something like:
[hooks]
changegroup.deploy = $HG update ; rsync Website account#theirserver:/path/to/docroot
I have a working solution to this. I created a batch file that creates an outgoing repo and starts the built in server so I can pull from it on the client machines. First it clears out the previous folder, then clones from my local working copy (there's a parameter to determine which tag it should clone from). Next it creates a map file and converts the Website folder to a new Website2 folder in order to preserve the history then gets rid of the original folder and renames the new one. Finally it spins up the built in server.
cd c:\inetpub\wwwroot
rd /S /Q _ProjectName
hg clone -- C:\inetpub\wwwroot\ProjectName#%1 C:\inetpub\wwwroot\_ProjectName
cd c:\inetpub\wwwroot\_ProjectName
echo include Website > map.txt
echo rename Website . >> map.txt
hg --config extensions.hgext.convert= convert --filemap map.txt . Website2
cd Website2
hg update
cd ..
hg remove Website/*
hg commit -m "Removed Website"
rename Website2 Website
hg serve
So it isn't pretty, but now I just need to call the batch file and pass the tag I want to build the outgoing website from (uat, dev etc.) and give it a minute to create my Website folder, with history, that I can use to pull from or push from. I don't need to call hg serve because I know the names of the client servers so I can push the changeset out by creating aliased remote repositories. But I included that step so the client machines can pull. I haven't fully explored this option, so I'm not sure whether it's got any particular advantage. It's fine for the case when it's just me working on the project, but if any other developer needs to work on this then the Uri for their local project server will obviously be different (http://SIMON-PC:8000/ won't be the case for everyone), in which case pushing into the client might be best.
But by using this approach my local working repo doesn't need to change and so I don't get any issues communicating with our central repo, the 404 errors mentioned in edit3. I keep the entire history of the repo with the convert process, so the next time I need to send changes I'm not starting at revision 1 - in other words it isn't destructive of the Website and although I am deleting the entire outgoing repo (_ProjectName) each time I am retaining the history and yet in a position to pull / push ONLY the Website directory because it is created each time as a 'standalone' repo
Can anybody tell me how to set up a mirror of a mercurial repository? I have a mercurial repo on my laptop, but want to auto mirror the repo on a NAS drive as a form of backup. Ideally, it would be cool if the solution checks a known location for a repo, and if one doesn't exist, create it, and from then on mirror any changes.
Another thing to bear in mind is that the NAS may not always be available, so I would need to accomodate this in some way.
I did something similar with git, but all the functionality should be in mercurial too.
I created manually a clone on some server (in my case a VPS somewhere on the net in case my house burns down with NAS and laptops in it).
With git you can create a "naked" repository, i.e. w/o a branch checked out.
Then I regularly push to it.
This can be automated using 'hooks', more info here .
The trick is to get the handling off the commit hook (oun intended) and that the syncing is not in your workflow. Run your push script using the 'at' command in a couple of minutes time. Then it runs asynchronously in the background. I would not be fancy here, try and handle failures gracefully.
You now have a setup which will keep the backup synched within a couple of minutes.
Mercurial gives you the freedom to do that however you would like. If you wanted, you could just setup a process to copy the repo from your local machine to the NAS at a regular interval. Everything about the repo is stored in the directory, and everything in the directory is just a file.
However, it sounds to me like you want to setup something more akin to a version control system like Subversion. I do something like this with one of my projects (actually, I moved it from SVN to Mercurial, but that's a different answer).
I have a repository on xp-dev.com and my local repository on my computer. I do all of the work on my local repository I want to do, issuing hg com very frequently. When I am done for the day/night I do a hg push ssh://hg2.xp-dev.com/myrepo to send all of my local changes to the remote server.
So, really all you want to do is an hg push to put your local repo on your NAS and then remember to do it again on a regular basis.