Hgweb and changegroup hook not working - mercurial

I'm using hgweb to publish my local repositories.
/project_path/project_name/.hg/.hgrc have:
[hooks]
changegroup.bitbucket = hg push ssh://hg#bitbucket.org/user/repo
When i'm use hg serve, all changegroup hooks working fine, but when i'm using hgweb through nginx with fcgi it's not working at all. I need those functionality to have some kind of backups.

It's mostly like Trust.
Mercurial needs to trust a hgrc file before it will parse/run it. If your /project_path/project_name/.hg/.hgrc file is owned by you then when you run hg serve with Mercurial running as you it's parsed/used. However, nginx runs as its own user, probably nginx which doesn't trust files owned by you, so when it invokes Mercurial those files are ignored (see Note).
That Mercurial trust link gives a better explanation and talks about how to say "nginx trusts X", but if it's a single-user system or you want everyone to trust you you can just throw a trust block in the system-global /etc/mercurial/hgrc file saying everyone trusts X.
Note: It doesn't actually just ignore those files it puts a warning on STDERR which in apache-land you'd find in your error.log, but in nginx land no one ever seems to find those warnings so I've no idea where nginx puts them.

I assume you have some kind of authentication issue here. When running hg serve from the command line, your ssh credentials are provided by an ssh-agent running in the background.
However, this does not work when running hgweb as a service, because there is no ssh-agent running in the background. If you would start an ssh-agent, there would be no possibility to enter the password for your ssh key.
Bitbucket uses ssh keys to authenticate you, so you can't just add your password to the above hg push command.
One possible solution would be to not use bitbucket as your backup, but a different mercurial server that let's you provide a simple password on the command line.
I'm afraid I can't help you further with this.

Related

How to automatically keep remote mercurial repository at tip after pushes

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.

mercurial: how to update production files without a server (EDIT: workaround + non-MS Windows solution)

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.

push to configured hg repository from web interface

I have a small group of developers and we all develop on our own machines. When we have code that is ready for testing, we merge and push to a RhodeCode installation. The hgrc file for my central RhodeCode repo is set up like this:
[paths]
test_env = /www/mysite/test
prod_env = /www/mysite/prod
[hooks]
changegroup = hg push test_env
so when a person checks code into RhodeCode, the changes are automatically pushed to the test environment. (There's a hg update in the test repo hgrc file, so the code updates there). This is perfect.
BUT.. I would like our RhodeCode admins to be able to push to prod without needing shell access on the server. Is there a way to allow someone to run a "hg push prod_env" from the RhodeCode interface? I figure since RhodeCode has full control over hg, it should be possible, but does this ability exists somewhere in RhodeCode? would it be a huge task to add it?
If not, how would you go about allowing an authenticated user to push a repository to production without shell access? I have been googling, but I can't seem to find anything. I know I could write a php script with a passthru("hg push test_env), but that seems like a permissions nightmare as apache runs as "nobody" and rhodecode owns the repo.
Thoughts?
Obviously, you cannot push nothing. But you can try to add or edit some file from the RhodeCode interface (which allows this to do) at the prod_env. This should cause local commit and push without accessing a shell.
For those looking at this question, here's how I solved it:
Wrote a passworded page in PHP with a button that executes this code:
shell_exec('hg pull -R ../wp-content/themes/2014');
I then put hg update in the hgrc file for the prod website, and made the web user and authorized user of the repository.
It works pretty good - i have slight security concerns because of the resulting file ownership, but assuming the PHP follows proper practice, there aren't any problems.

Is there anything like svnserve for Mercurial?

I'm attracted to Mercurial as a DVCS platform, but would like an easy to use server similar to svnserve. There is HgServe, but that appears to be read-only. If I want to be able to host the server on another machine, it appears I need to set up apache, etc. Is that really the case? Is there an easier method for a local network where security isn't an issue?
The problem here is that it's so easy, the mercurial documentation fails to appropriately cover it. If you clone with ssh:
hg clone ssh://user#host//path/to/repo /local/path
It will do the right thing on the "server" system (it automatically runs hg serve on the other end for the duration of the operation), and then any subsequent operations (push, pull, etc.) will be automatically run over ssh. (Make sure you use the double slash after the hostname if you want your path to start at the filesystem root, otherwise it'll start wherever ssh puts you).
Note that Hg "users" are separate from ssh users, so if you want everyone to use the same restricted account for ssh, they can - hg will still identify their changesets by the user set up in their .hgrc.

Mercurial repository on FTP

I wonder, if it's possible to create and serve to the clients Mercurial repository on the
some FTP folder with RW access . Did someone do a thing like that ?
Thank you in advance.
Just for the sake of completeness, because I had the same problem and feel that there is another, much simpler solution:
Mercurial cloning on local folders "just works", so if you mounted the ftp as a local folder or drive, you could just push/pull/clone to that (and have your repository end up on the ftp).
On Windows, you can e.g. use FTPUse or NetDrive to have your FTP folder mounted as a local drive, the former is free but a CLI tool which removes the virtual drives if the program is closed, the latter has a GUI but is only free for personal use and doesn't work (yet) on Win8. I don't have a Linux machine at hand now, but you should be able to achieve the same using ftpfs.
Once you did it (and your ftp server is now mapped e.g. to f:), you can simply use that virtual drive (or any subfolder) as a remote target for your mercurial operations. Works like a charm for me.
All things are possible. But that would be hard.
The bit where the network transport matters is when cloning a repository, and the standard ways of doing that depend on either serving over HTTP, or having SSH access to the repository host. There's no FTP-based transport for cloning as far as I can see.
If that's the only sharing mechanism you have available, then you could probably work something out using Mercurial bundles. The procedure would be something like the following:
Commit your edits to a local repository
Make a bundle using hg bundle --all my-bundle.hg
FTP my-bundle.hg to the server
The other users of the repository can then use FTP to retrieve the my-bundle.hg file to their local machine, go to their local copy of the repository, and then hg pull my-bundle.hg to pull in any revisions which are in the bundle but not in the local repository. When they want to share their changes, they make a fresh bundle as above, and push that back to the server. The --all option puts all of the changesets into the bundle file -- you can be cleverer and only export 'recent' changes, but that gets a little more complicated and risks losing changesets: using --all is brutal but fail-safe.
There's obviously a fair amount of scope for confusion here, and race conditions (timestamped filenames might help), and hair-pulling-out, and your users would doubtless appreciate some scripts to make this easier, but if all you've got available is an FTP server, you don't have very many options.
Good luck.
This question on SuperUser might be interesting. The core idea seem to evolve around running a background process that synchronizes a local folder with a remote ftp folder. Which might of use to you.
But I dont know what happens when more than one user tries synchronize at the same time. Since using this approach bypasses all the protection that mercurial has regarding locking the tree and such.