Help: hgweb

Configuring hgweb

Mercurial's internal web server, hgweb, can serve either a single repository, or a tree of repositories. In the second case, repository paths and global options can be defined using a dedicated configuration file common to "hg serve", "hgweb.wsgi", "hgweb.cgi" and "hgweb.fcgi".

This file uses the same syntax as other Mercurial configuration files but recognizes only the following sections:

  • web
  • paths
  • collections

The "web" options are thoroughly described in "hg help config".

The "paths" section maps URL paths to paths of repositories in the filesystem. hgweb will not expose the filesystem directly - only Mercurial repositories can be published and only according to the configuration.

The left hand side is the path in the URL. Note that hgweb reserves subpaths like "rev" or "file", try using different names for nested repositories to avoid confusing effects.

The right hand side is the path in the filesystem. If the specified path ends with "*" or "**" the filesystem will be searched recursively for repositories below that point. With "*" it will not recurse into the repositories it finds (except for ".hg/patches"). With "**" it will also search inside repository working directories and possibly find subrepositories.

In this example:

[paths]
/projects/a = /srv/tmprepos/a
/projects/b = c:/repos/b
/ = /srv/repos/*
/user/bob = /home/bob/repos/**
  • The first two entries make two repositories in different directories appear under the same directory in the web interface
  • The third entry will publish every Mercurial repository found in "/srv/repos/", for instance the repository "/srv/repos/quux/" will appear as "http://server/quux/"
  • The fourth entry will publish both "http://server/user/bob/quux/" and "http://server/user/bob/quux/testsubrepo/"

The "collections" section is deprecated and has been superseded by "paths".