Mercurial/Redmine - 404 Error When Accessing Repository - mercurial

Question

Hopefully this is a quick fix for those with experience!
I just finished up installing Mercurial and Redmine on my shared hostgator server to the tee from Redmine and Mercurial documentation, but have run in to a small problem. Mercurial works pefectly, I was able to create a repo, clone it, and sync to it without any issues, except when I add the repo to Redmine and go to the repository tab, I get a 404 error. I made sure to double check that I set the directory beginning from the root and it didn't work. I tried multiple different kinds of ways of writing out the directory but still No luck. I ended up opening my production.log, and this is the entry written every time I get the 404 error.
Processing RepositoriesController#show (for 74.56.***.*** at 2012-01-10 13:59:43) [GET]
Parameters: {"action"=>"show", "id"=>"testhg1", "controller"=>"repositories"}
hg: error during getting info: hg exited with non-zero status: 255
hg: error during getting info: hg exited with non-zero status: 255
Rendering template within layouts/base
Rendering common/error (404)
Completed in 280ms (View: 12, DB: 2) | 404 Not Found [http://redmine.mydomain.org/projects/testhg1/repository]
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Answer 1

We ran into the same error on a Centos 6.3 server.
In our case, we were also getting the following error in /var/log/httpd/error_log:
abort: requirement 'dotencode' not supported!
We were creating our repositories using RhodeCode which was using a much newer version of mercurial (2.3.2) than the one that comes with CentOS 6.3 (1.4). Updating the version of mercurial on the system using a pre-built RPM from repoforge solved the problem. The extremely old version of mercurial available from yum on CentOS did not support the dotencode capability that the newer 2.3.2 Mercurial was using.

Answer 2

Went into development mode to get some better logging:
Processing RepositoriesController#show (for ***.***.***.*** at 2012-03-15 22:54:47) [GET]
Parameters: {"action"=>"show", "id"=>"go", "controller"=>"repositories"}
Setting Columns (0.9ms) SHOW FIELDS FROM `settings`
... more unimportant queries ...
Repository::Mercurial Columns (0.7ms) SHOW FIELDS FROM `repositories`
Shelling out: '/usr/bin/hg' '-R' '/var/lib/hg/godc' '--encoding' 'utf-8' '--config' 'extensions.redminehelper=/var/www/corp/redmine/lib/redmine/scm/adapters/mercurial/redminehelper.py' '--config' 'diff.git=false' 'rhsummary'
hg: error during getting info: hg exited with non-zero status: 255
Shelling out: '/usr/bin/hg' '-R' '/var/lib/hg/godc' '--encoding' 'utf-8' '--config' 'extensions.redminehelper=/var/www/corp/redmine/lib/redmine/scm/adapters/mercurial/redminehelper.py' '--config' 'diff.git=false' 'rhmanifest' '-r' 'tip' ''
Rendering template within layouts/base
Rendering common/error (404)
so the error seems to be with this command:
'/usr/bin/hg' '-R' '/var/lib/hg/godc' '--encoding' 'utf-8' '--config' 'extensions.redminehelper=/var/www/corp/redmine/lib/redmine/scm/adapters/mercurial/redminehelper.py' '--config' 'diff.git=false' 'rhsummary'
which works fine when I run is as root
root#redacted:/var/www/corp/redmine# '/usr/bin/hg' '-R' '/var/lib/hg/godc' '--encoding' 'utf-8' '--config' 'extensions.redminehelper=/var/www/corp/redmine/lib/redmine/scm/adapters/mercurial/redminehelper.py' '--config' 'diff.git=false' 'rhsummary'
... returns XML that S. O. doesn't want to show ...
(if you know how to fix this, please edit)
but my webserver runs as www-data which doesn't have access to the hg dir
root#redacted:/var/www/corp/redmine# sudo su - www-data
$ '/usr/bin/hg' '-R' '/var/lib/hg/godc' '--encoding' 'utf-8' '--config' 'extensions.redminehelper=/var/www/corp/redmine/lib/redmine/scm/adapters/mercurial/redminehelper.py' '--config' 'diff.git=false' 'rhsummary'
abort: repository /var/lib/hg/godc not found!
$ ls -l /var/lib/hg
ls: cannot open directory /var/lib/hg: Permission denied
$
give my www-data user access to the repo and the command now works:
$ groups
www-data hg
$ '/usr/bin/hg' '-R' '/var/lib/hg/godc' '--encoding' 'utf-8' '--config' 'extensions.redminehelper=/var/www/corp/redmine/lib/redmine/scm/adapters/mercurial/redminehelper.py' '--config' 'diff.git=false' 'rhsummary'
... returns XML that S. O. doesn't want to show ...
$
Tested it on redmine and still got the error but when I restarted apache everything was as it should be.
(I'm using phusion passenger.)
The upgrade turned out to be a red herring, the actual thing that caused this was the change from running with script/server as my user (which had repo access) to running as a properly installed phusion passenger production instance.
In your case, with your presumably $7/month hostgator shared server install, I'm sure you don't have access to modify permissions but you can at lest use the process I described to try and determine the problem. I don't know much about hostgator's install but it seems likely that you might be having the same issue.