Managing Repositories¶

hg.mozilla.org has a self-service mechanism for managing some repositories on the server.

Overview¶

You can SSH into hg.mozilla.org and execute specific commands to perform repository management. You don’t get a full shell. Instead, you will be interfacing with an interactive wizard that will guide you through available options.

What Repositories Can Be Managed¶

Currently, the self-service interface only allows management of user repositories. These are repositories under https://hg.mozilla.org/users/.

For management of non-user repositories, please file a Developer Services :: hg.mozilla.org bug.

Who Has Access¶

Any account with level 1 commit access can push to user repositories and can manage their own user repositories.

When to Use a User Repository¶

hg.mozilla.org server operators have a reluctant tolerance towards the existence of user repositories on hg.mozilla.org.

In the ideal world, Mozilla is not a generic repository hosting service and hosting of non-critical repositories would be pushed off to free service hosting providers, such as Bitbucket. One reason is performance: user repositories take resources that could otherwise be put towards making other services and repositories faster.

However, there are some scenarios where third party hosting providers won’t fulfill developer needs.

Important

Unless you have a specific need that requires hosting on hg.mozilla.org, you should consider hosting your repository on another service instead of hg.mozilla.org.

Configuring¶

You will need to configure your SSH client to talk to hg.mozilla.org. See SSH Configuration for instructions.

Creating a User Repository¶

A new repository can be created by running the clone <repo> command. e.g.:

$ ssh hg.mozilla.org clone my-new-repo

An interactive wizard will guide you through the process that should be self-expanatory. You’ll have the option of creating an empty repository or cloning (forking) from an existing repository.

Important

Creating repositories can sometimes take many minutes. Do not ctrl+c the operation or the servers may be left in an inconsistent state.

If you encounter a problem, file a bug or say something in #vcs on Matrix.

Editing a User Repository¶

It is possible to configure a number of options on repositories. The common interface for all actions is to run edit <repo>. e.g.:

$ ssh hg.mozilla.org edit my-repo

An interactive wizard will guide you through available options. Some of those options are described below.

Repository Description¶

It is possible to edit the repository’s description. This is text that appears in the repository listing at https://hg.mozilla.org/.

Tip

We recommend always defining a description so people know what your repository is used for.

Publishing and Non-Publishing Repositories¶

Mercurial has a feature called phases that prevents changesets that have been published from being mutated (deleted, rewritten, etc). It prevents a foot gun where you could accidentally rewrite history that has been shared with others, which would result in divergent branches and confusion.

By default, Mercurial repositories are publishing, which means that anything pushed gets published (bumped to the public phase in technical terms) and Mercurial clients won’t let you change those commits.

Important

User repositories on hg.mozilla.org are non-publishing by default.

If you would like to change whether your repository is publishing or non-publishing, use the edit <repo> command and select the appropriate option.

Obsolescence¶

It is possible to toggle the obsolescence feature on individual user repositories.

Obsolescence is an experimental feature of Mercurial that records how changesets evolve over time and allows old, obsoleted commits to disappear from the repository.

Obsolescence is an aspect of changeset evolution.

There are downsides to enabling obsolescence:

The transfer of obsolescence markers during push isn’t optimal and may significantly increase push times.
Obsolescence doesn’t yet integrate very well with hgweb (the HTTP/HTML repository viewer).
We may have to disable this feature or incur data loss due to its experimental nature.

Important

Due to the experimental state of the obsolescence feature, we may have to disable this feature or incur data loss at any time.

Warning

Enable obsolescence at your own risk.

Tip

You do not need to enable obsolescence unless a user of your repository is using the evolve extension.

Deleting a User Repository¶

To delete a user repository, run edit <repo> and select the delete option.

User Repository URLs¶

Your own user repositories are accessible under the following URLs:

ssh://hg.mozilla.org/users/<username>/<repo> (read/write) https://hg.mozilla.org/users/<username>/<repo> (read only)

Your SSH/LDAP username is normalized. Specifically, the @ in your email address is normalized to _. e.g. mary@example.com becomes mary_example.com.

When you create a user repository, you probably want to set up some paths in your hgrc. Here is an example .hg/hgrc:

[paths]
default = https://hg.mozilla.org/users/me_example.com/my-repo
default-push = ssh://hg.mozilla.org/users/me_example.com/my-repo