I've got a Mercurial repository that contains a subdirectory for design files and a sub directory for code files.
What's the best way for me to deploy the code subdirectories on my server, keeping it secure, without deploying the design files?
Ideally you should have these in separate repos as Kyle pointed out, optionally, using sub repositories.
However, with your setup as is something like this might be all you need:
hg archive -X designDocs /path/to/deploymentDir
or if you need to transfer it first:
hg archive -X designDocs --type zip /path/to/newDeploymentArchive.zip
You might try using subrepositories for the two subdirectories.
Related
Update because of new insights: Upon seeing this question five years later, I realise that this stems from trying to use a version control system as a package manager. This of course leads to all sorts of unexpected issues, and we shouldn't be using it that way. If you're reading this question, I suggest searching for a package manager for your preferred language.
My original question: I'm currently in the process of moving from Subversion to Mercurial, and I have to say I don't regret that decision. However, when trying to convert my project, I ran into a problem of Mercurial, which I can't seem to get fixed. I have two distinct projects: one is a framework, and the other is an application that relies on that framework. Here's what the repositories look like:
The Framework repository:
docs/
deploy/
lib/
tests/
The Application repository:
application/
config/
lib/
tests/
www/
What I'd like is for the application's lib directory to contain a copy of the frameworks' lib/ directory. I used to do this using svn:externals. Now, I am aware that Mercurial supports the concept of subrepositories, but that doesn't seem like the "correct" solution, as it doesn't actually pull in the lib/ directory like I wanted, as you'll still have to pull and push changes manually. That, plus once you clone the framework repository, you'll get all of it, not just the lib/ directory. I only need the lib/ directory, not the tests, or the docs.
Now, I thought up two different solutions to this problem, but I wonder which is the best. The first solution would be to clone the framework in a different directory altogether and create symlink in the application's lib/ directory which points to the framework's lib/ directory. Putting the symlink in .hgignore should make sure all is well, I think? That means that you could edit the frameworks code, and commit that, and you could edit the application's code and commit that, too.
The other option is to have multiple repositories. The framework gets pulled as a whole, which means you'll get the docs/, deploy/, test/ etc. directories, which are not needed for usage of the framework. I thought maybe creating a repository purely for the library might be a solution, although I sincerely doubt it, as the Unit Tests are very dependant upon the library itself.
Does anyone know a decent solution for this problem?
You should put separate components in their own repositories. Then, when you create an application, you can use the convert extension to create a pullabale framework repository out of the normal one:
$ hg convert --filemap map.txt framework new-framework
with map.txt containing the renames/includes/excludes (the following one should only include the lib directory and move everything in there to the repository root):
include lib
rename lib .
From the application repo, you can now just pull the framework repo (use -f the first time, since the repositories will likely have nothing to do with each other).
$ cd project
$ hg pull -f ../new-framwork
$ hg merge
Now, when the development goes on, you just have to re-create the converted repo every time before you pull and you're good to go. We actually have a hook on our framework repository that re-creates the converted repo on every changegroup (= every push).
This way you have both work areas (app and framework) in their own repositories, while the app repo contains the complete framework history and is able to be updated by simply pulling from the converted repo.
You should separate out the libraries into a separate repository if you need to refer to only that.
Provided you actually do need to only refer to that. What is the problem with referring to the repository containing the lib directory + other stuff, other than "it doesn't feel right"?
As for "still have to pull and push manually", when you pull your main clone, it'll pull the subrepos as well, but it won't update them to a newer revision, which is a good thing, you need to do that manually, just as you should with Subversion.
Our company policy is not to back up hidden folders.
Is it possible to change the .hg folder name to something visible?
There's no way to rename that directory using standard mercurial configuration options. If you're on unix, and I'm guessing your are if .hg sounds hidden, you could use a pre-backup script (or cron job) to snapshot it using cp -al into something with a different name. Using -l gets you hardlinks, so it won't actually take up extra disk.
However, most people back up their .hg repositories with a push to a different mercurial server, which can be easily scripted too.
Can you create a tar archive of the repository before your company's backup cycle runs via cron?
You can always try to fool the back up system by creating a link to the .hg folder with a "backupable" name.
Have just started using git. Building and installing it was easy. Then I went into the directory of one of my web projects and added a git repo to it.
$ cd ~/Sites/webapp
$ git init (and so on)
I also set up gitweb, and when I added ~/Sites/webapp to $projectroot setting in gitweb.cgi, that appeared in my browser when I went to http://localhost/gitweb/gitweb.cgi
My question is thus -- from what I understand, git doesn't have a central repo concept. Every project that I may be working on will have its own git repository. Since my projects are all over my hard disk, their respective repos are also all over the hard disk. How do I add multiple repositories to gitweb? Is there some kind of central registry of all my repos? Should I really rejig how I work, and move all my projects to a central directory? How is this done?
Better late then never I guess.
I solved it by creating a project root directory and linking the git repositories.
project_root="/opt/gitweb"
In /opt/gitweb
ln -s ~/Sites/webapp webapp.git
ln -s ~/someotherplace/whereitis/application appliation.git
I do this by creating an empty repository and linking to the repositories I want to browse. This workaround is necessary because of the complicated way instaweb runs gitweb and sets the project root.
git init instaweb
cd instaweb
ln -s ~/projects/gitproj1 gitproj1
ln -s ~/projects/gitproj2 gitproj2
git instaweb --httpd webrick
The server is up and running now and the homepage will list a .git project (which is the empty repository you just initialised) along with the two actual projects you linked to.
So, I'm trying to checkout just the TestNG plugin from the Netbeans contrib repository. (Or is it module? I'm new to Mercurial, so I don't really know the lingo yet.)
When I run the following command...
hg clone http://hg.netbeans.org/main/contrib/
...I get the entire repository, which contains all of the the contrib plug-ins. Is it possible to just pull this location?
http://hg.netbeans.org/main/contrib/file/tip/testng/
Thanks!
This concept is called "narrow cloning" and no, it's not possible at the moment in Mercurial.
It's on the radar of some of us that contribute to Mercurial but it's a hard problem to solve. For example:
How do you calculate the hash of any new commits you make if you don't have all of the files in the repo?
What happens if you try to view the history of a file in contrib/testng if that file was moved from another folder?
I'm not sure, but I think the answer in the general case is "probably not".
If the repository is local (it doesn't sound like it is in your case), you can do something like:
hg archive -R /path/to/my/repo -I /path/to/my/repo/folder/i/want export-folder-name
(The command would need to be something that exports non-VC'd files, rather than creating a partial repo, since the .hg stuff is stored once at the toplevel, rather than in pieces in each folder as SVN does.)
It doesn't work on remote repositories, though. Neither does "hg log", and the hg folks explained why:
Imagine I send a log -p command to http://www.kernel.org/hg/linux-2.6, which is
approaching 100k changesets. At one diff per second (lots of seeking), this will
take about 3 hours of CPU/disk time on the server, nevermind metric tons of
bandwidth. It would be faster and simpler for everyone just to clone the repo
and do the log locally.
I suspect hg archive can't work remotely for the same reason.
I have a Mercurial repository containing a handful of related projects. I want to branch just one of these projects to work on it elsewhere.
Is cloning just part of a repository possible, and is that the right way to achieve this?
What you want is a narrow or partial clone, but this is unfortunately not yet supported.
If you already have a big repository and you realize that it would make sense to split it into several smaller repositories, then you can use the convert extension to do a Mercurial to Mercurial conversion. Note that this creates a new repository foo and you cannot push/pull between your-big-repo and foo.
The convert extension is not enabled by default so add the following to your repo's hgrc file or your mercurial.ini file:
[extensions]
hgext.convert=
Then create a map.txt file with
include "libs/foo"
rename "libs/foo" .
(note you can use forward slashes even on Windows) and run
$ hg convert --filemap map.txt your-big-repo foo
That will make foo a repository with the full history of the libs/foo folder from your-big-repo.
If you want to delete all evidence of foo from your-big-repo you can make another conversion where you use exclude libs/foo to get rid of the directory.
When you have several repositories like that and you want to use them as a whole, then you should look at subrepositories. This feature lets you include other repositories in a checkout — similarly to how svn:externals work. Please follow the recommendations on that wiki page.
Instead of doing a partial clone, you can use the Convert Extension to split your repo into more than one repo by sub repository.
Specifically, see the section, Converting from Mercurial:
It's also useful to filter Mercurial repositories to get subsets of an existing one. For example to transform a subdirectory subfoo of a repository foo into a repository with its own life (while keeping its full history), do the following:
$ echo include subfoo > /tmp/myfilemap
$ echo rename subfoo . >> /tmp/myfilemap
$ hg convert --filemap /tmp/myfilemap /path/to/repo/foo /tmp/mysubfoo-repo
I've stumbled accross this issue and found one way to do it: Using symlinks (Linux only unfortunately)
For example, if you only need /project in the repository, on your computer clone the repo in another folder, then use ln -s /repo/location/ project. Mercurial will handle it
(Late 2016) Mainline Mercurial still doesn't package support for "narrow clones" but there are third party extensions that tackle the problem in different ways.
If you can cope with just a narrow checkout (aka "sparse checkout" or "partial checkout by file path") then Facebook's sparse.py extension from the hg-experimental repository (look inside the hgext3rd/ directory) may be workable. In this scenario, you still clone the full history (thus the .hg directory is no smaller) but your working directory only shows/acts on a subset of the full repository.
Alternatively Google have created a NarrowHG extension that does narrow cloning (aka "partial cloning by file path"). You will need to be in control of the server, the client and be willing to use experimental features but it really does restrict the clone's copied history in .hg to a subset of what was in the original repository.
(2019) The sparse extension was merged into Mercurial 4.3 as the experimental sparse extension. The NarrowHG extension was merged into Mercurial 4.6 as the hgext.narrow extension.
It is not possible, hg clone will clone the whole repository.
You can take a look a the sub-repository extension that allows you to have repositories inside a repository, which might match your needs.
This is straight forward with the Convert extension.