hg serve simply hangs in terminal

Question

I've started using Mercurial for my personal projects and I'm currently going through Joel's tutorial here: http://hginit.com/02.html

The problem is when I type in hg serve in the terminal, it simply hangs. Other commands like hg init works perfectly. Anyone know what's going on?

I installed mercurial by doing this: sudo apt-get install mercurial meld

Answer 1

You want to use the -d option to run it in the background:

hg serve -d

Otherwise it will just run as a foreground process, logging to stdout and stderr.

Run hg help serve to see more options.

Answer 2

Try setting the port to something other than 8000, like hg serve -p 9001. Could be a conflict. Also note that when it runs, it doesn't print anything out to the terminal. It just sits there until you CTRL+C out of it.