mercurial-server

mercurial-server makes a group of repositories available to the developers

you choose, identified by ssh keys, with easy key and access management

based on hg.

Paul Crowley, paul@lshift.net, 2008-2009

This software may be used and distributed according to the terms

of the GNU General Public License, incorporated herein by reference.

http://hg.opensource.lshift.net/mercurial-server/

All of the repositories controlled by mercurial-server are owned by a

single user (the "hg" user in what follows), but many remote users can act

on them, and different users can have different permissions. We don't use

file permissions to achieve that - instead, developers log in as the "hg"

user when they connect to the repository host using ssh, using ssh URLs of

the form "ssh://hg@repository-host/repository-name". A restricted shell

prevents them from using this access for unauthorized purposes. Developers

are authenticated only using SSH keys; no other form of authentication is

supported. 

To give a user access to the repository, place their key in an

appropriately-named subdirectory of "/etc/mercurial-server/keys" and run

For convenient remote control of access, you can instead (if you have the

privileges) make changes to a special repository called "hgadmin", which

contains its own "access.conf" file and "keys" directory. Changes pushed to

this repository take effect immediately. The two "access.conf" files are

concatenated, and the keys directories merged.

QUICK START

You and all developers using this system will need an SSH public key, and

will almost certainly want to be running ssh-agent (or its equivalent, eg

Pageant under Windows). If you're not familiar with ssh-agent, you should

learn about that before using this.

In what follows, certain operations (eg installing mercurial-server itself)

have to be done on the repository server (which we call "repository-host"),

but any operation that involves checking in or out of Mercurial can be done

wherever is most convenient to you; the most usual arrangment would be that

you'd do these things at the machine you sit at, and on which you run

ssh-agent, which is what authenticates you when you talk to the repository

server.

Ensure there is no user called "hg" on the repository host, and run

"./install". This installs the mercurial-server files and control files, and

creates and sets up the "hg" user.

Place your SSH public key in the directory "/etc/mercurial-server/keys/root".

I suggest creating yourself a directory and naming the key after your hostname

(ie the file is called something like

"/etc/mercurial-server/keys/root/yourname/yourhostname") so that you can

easily manage users who have a different key on each host they use. Then run

The repository is now ready to use, and you are now the sole user able to

change and create repositories on this repository host.  

CREATING REPOSITORIES

To create a new repository, you clone a local repository onto the remote

server. So if you want a new empty repository called "myproject", you can do

(as yourself):

    hg init myproject

    hg clone myproject ssh://hg@repository-host/myproject

ADDING OTHER USERS

Because your key is in the "keys/root" subdirectory, you have the equivalent

of "root privileges" over mercurial-server (not the whole computer, just

mercurial-server). You can add other root users by putting their keys next to

yours, or you can make less privileged users by putting their keys in the

"keys/users" subdirectory - these users will be able to read and write to any

repository (except one - see below) but will not be able to create new

repositories. As always, when you change "/etc/mercurial-server/keys" you need

LOGGING

Every push and pull is logged with the key used: see the file .hg/serve-log in

each repository.

USING HGADMIN

It can be inconvenient to log on to the repository server, become root, copy

keys around, and run "refresh-auth" every time you want to change user

privileges. This is where mercurial-server shines :-) Suppose you have another

user's SSH public key in the file "/tmp/theirkey" (on the machine you sit at,

not necessarily the repository server) and you want to give them user-level

access to the repository server. Run these commands:

    hg clone ssh://hg@repository-server/hgadmin

    cd hgadmin

    mkdir keys/user/thatuser

    cp /tmp/theirkey keys/user/thatuser/theirhostname

    hg add

    hg commit -m "Added key for thatuser"

    hg push

In other words, hgadmin is a version controlled version of

"/etc/mercurial-server/keys", and changes to it take effect immediately. Only

"keys/root" users can act on "hgadmin" - those with keys in "keys/users" are

locked out. Multiple admins can use Mercurial's version control to cooperate

on controlling access to the repository server in a natural way. You can also

add "root" users by putting their key in the "keys/root" directory in just the

same way - these users will now be able to control hgadmin and create new

repositories just as you can.

Once you're working with "hgadmin", it can be convenient to remove all the

keys in "/etc/mercurial-server/keys" and all the entries in

"/etc/mercurial-server/access.conf" and use hgadmin to control everything. If

you find yourself locked out, you can get back in again by restoring some of

the entries you removed from these files - remember,

"/etc/mercurial-server/access.conf" takes precedence over the "access.conf" in

"hgadmin".

ACCESS.CONF

Out of the box, there are just two kinds of users: the ones with keys in

"keys/root" and those in "keys/users". However, you can change this by editing

"access.conf". There are two "access.conf" files, one in

"/etc/mercurial-server" and one in "hgadmin"; the two are simply concatenated

before being read.

Each line of access.conf has the following syntax:

<rule> <condition> <condition> ...

Rule is one of

init - allow any operation, including the creation of new repositories

write - allow reads and writes to this file in this repository

read - allow the repo to be read but reject matching writes

deny - deny all requests

A condition is a globpattern matched against a relative path, one of:

user=<globpattern> - user's key

repo=<globpattern> - repo (as the user supplies it)

file=<globpattern> - file in the repo

branch=<globpattern> - name of the branch

The first rule in the file which has all its conditions satisfied is used to

determine whether an action is allowed.

Paths cannot contain any special characters except "/"; glob patterns cannot

contain any special characters except "/" and "*". "*" matches zero or more

characters not including "/" while "**" matches zero or more characters

including "/".

Blank lines and lines that start with "#" are ignored.

FILE CONDITIONS

mercurial-server supports file and branch conditions, which restrict an

operation depending on what files it modifies and what branch the work is on.

However, the way these conditions work is subtle and can be counterintuitive -

if you want to keep things simple, stick to user and repo conditions, and then

things are likely to work the way you would expect.

The rules file is used to make four decisions:

- Whether to allow a repository to be created

- Whether to allow access to a repository

- Whether to allow a changeset on a particular branch at all

- Whether to allow a changeset to change a particular file

When the first two of these decisions are being made, nothing is known about

what files might be changed, and so all file conditions automatically succeed

for the purpose of such decisions. This means that doing tricky things with

file conditions can have counterintuitive consequences:

- You cannot limit read access to a subset of a repository with a "read" rule

and a file condition: any user who has access to a repository can read all of

it and its full history. Such a rule can only have the effect of masking a

later "write" rule, as in this example:

   read repo=specialrepo file=dontwritethis

   write repo=specialrepo

allows all users to read specialrepo, and to write to all files *except* that

any changeset which writes to "dontwritethis" will be rejected.

- For similar reasons, don't give "init" rules file conditions.

- Don't try to deny write access to a particular file on a particular branch -

a developer can write to the file on another branch and then merge it in.

Either deny all writes to the branch from that user, or allow them to write to

all the files they can write to on any branch. In other words, something like

this will have the intended effect:

  write user=docs/* branch=docs file=docs/*

But something like this will not have the intended effect; it will effectively

allow these users to write to any file on any branch, by writing it to "docs"

first:

  write user=docs/* branch=docs

  write user=docs/* file=docs/*

  read user=docs/*

HOW IT WORKS

When a developer attempts to connect to a repository via ssh, the SSH daemon

searches for a match for that user's key in ~hg/.ssh/authorized_keys. If the

developer is authorised to connect to the repository they will have an entry

in this file. The entry includes a "command" prefix which specifies that the

The file ~hg/.ssh/authorized_keys is generated by "refresh-auth", which

recurses through two directories of files containing SSH keys and generates an

entry in authorized_keys for each one, using the name of the key file as the

identifier for the developer. These keys will live in the "keys" subdirectory

"/etc/mercurial-server" and the "keys" subdirectory of a repository called

"hgadmin". A hook in this repository re-runs "refresh-auth" on the most recent

version after every push.

Finally, hook in an extension is run for each changeset that is remotely

committed, which uses the rules file to determine whether to allow the

changeset.

SECURITY OF MERCURIAL-SERVER

mercurial-server relies entirely on sshd to grant access to remote users. As a

result, it runs no daemons, installs no setuid programs, and no part of it

runs as root except the install process: all programs run as the user hg. And

any attack on mercurial-server can only be started if the Bad Guys already

have a public key in ~hg/.ssh/authorized_keys, otherwise sshd will bar the

way. No matter what command the user tries to run on the remote system via

ssh, mercurial-server is run. 

It parses the command line the user asked for, and interprets and runs the

corresponding hg operation itself if access is allowed, so users can only read

and add to history within repositories; they cannot run any other hg command.

In addition, every push and pull is logged with a datestamp, changeset ID and

the key that performed the operation.

However, while the first paragraph holds no matter what bugs mercurial-server

contains, the second depends on the relevant code being correct; though the

entire codebase is currently only about twice as long as this README,

mercurial-server is a fairly new program and may harbour bugs. Backups are

essential!

THANKS

Thanks for reading this far. If you use mercurial-server, please tell me about

it.

Paul Crowley, 2009