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

     3 mercurial-server gives your developers remote read/write access to

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

     4 centralized Mercurial repositories using SSH public key authentication; it

     5 based on hg.

     5 provides convenient and fine-grained key management and access control.

    25 SUMMARY

    25 For details on how to install and use mercurial-server, see doc/manual.docbook.

    26 

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

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

    29 based on hg.

    30 

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

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

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

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

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

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

    37 prevents them from using this access for unauthorized purposes. Developers

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

    39 supported. 

    40 

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

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

    43 "/usr/local/share/mercurial-server/refresh-auth". You can then control what

    44 access they have to what repositories by editing the control file

    45 "/etc/mercurial-server/access.conf", which can match the names of these keys

    46 against a glob pattern. 

    47 

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

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

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

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

    52 concatenated, and the keys directories merged.

    53 

    54 QUICK START

    55 

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

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

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

    59 learn about that before using this.

    60 

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

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

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

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

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

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

    67 server.

    68 

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

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

    71 creates and sets up the "hg" user.

    72 

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

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

    75 (ie the file is called something like

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

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

    78 "/usr/local/share/mercurial-server/refresh-auth".

    79 

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

    81 change and create repositories on this repository host.  

    82 

    83 CREATING REPOSITORIES

    84 

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

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

    87 (as yourself):

    88 

    89     hg init myproject

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

    91 

    92 ADDING OTHER USERS

    93 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   101 to re-run "/usr/local/share/mercurial-server/refresh-auth".

   102 

   103 LOGGING

   104 

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

   106 each repository.

   107 

   108 USING HGADMIN

   109 

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

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

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

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

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

   115 access to the repository server. Run these commands:

   116 

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

   118     cd hgadmin

   119     mkdir keys/users/thatuser

   120     cp /tmp/theirkey keys/users/thatuser/theirhostname

   121     hg add

   122     hg commit -m "Added key for thatuser"

   123     hg push

   124 

   125 In other words, hgadmin is a version controlled version of

   126 "/etc/mercurial-server", and changes to it take effect immediately -

   127 "refresh-auth" is run after every push. 

   128 

   129 With the default access.conf file (see doc/configuring-access for more

   130 details) only users in "keys/root" can act on "hgadmin" - those with keys in

   131 "keys/users" cannot even read this repository. So multiple admins can use

   132 Mercurial's version control to cooperate on controlling access to the

   133 repository server in a natural way.

   134 

   135 You can also create an "access.conf" file in hgadmin, and this is appended to

   136 /etc/mercurial-server/access.conf whenever this is read - in other words,

   137 rules in the latter take precedence over those in the former. So once you're

   138 working with "hgadmin", it can be convenient to remove all the keys in

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

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

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

   142 the entries you removed from these files.

   143 

   144 MORE INFORMATION

   145 

   146 For more on how to use mercurial-server and configure access, see the files in

   147 the doc directory.

   148 

   149 THANKS

   150 

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

   152 it.