How to create a Mercurial repository on a remote IIS web server

Question

I have a Windows Server 2003 running Mercurial's hgwebdir.cgi to serve repositories. Push/Pull etc is working as expected for existing repositories.

Currently I'm using remote desktop If I need a new repository on the server.

Is there a better way to do it? Command line, web interface, cgi?

Answer 1

currently , running hg init where you want the repository is the way to do it, any other way would require hgwebdir to implement some kind of security better left to other/better/more os specific tools. It's not that much of a leap to imagine that the HG devs rather focus on the versioning of files than reinventing the wheel with security, at least right now.

Answer 2

Mercurial by itself only allows for the creation of repositories locally or over ssh. For http you need to either log in to the server via command line and hg init or via RDP and do essentially the same.

It is, however, very easy to create a small CGI script that will create new remote repositories over HTTP. Here's one I built that works on unix and is likely easily adapted to windows:

http://ry4an.org/unblog/UnBlog/2009-09-17