How do I set up Mercurial and hgweb on IIS?

Question

I've been looking all over for decent instructions on how to get hgweb working on IIS but I haven't found much of worth.

There's this "step by step" on the Mercurial wiki, but it's not very good. There's also this and this, but again, I can't find good steps to lead up to where those get started.

Solution 1

I just had to install a fresh Mercurial instance yesterday, here's updated instructions for 1.7:

1. Install Mercurial (these instructions were tested with 1.7)
2. Install Python (for Mercurial 1.7, you must use the x86 version of Python 2.6.6)
3. You will need to download the hgweb.cgi file from the Mercurial source. You can download the source by running: hg clone https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/

4. Create a folder that will be your web application folder. You will need to copy three things into this folder:

   • The hgweb.cgi file
   • The contents of the Library.zip from your "C:\Program Files\Mercurial" folder
   • The Templates folder from your "C:\Program Files\Mercurial"

5. You will need to make sure you have Python set up in IIS.

   • Enable CGI via the following: Control Panel -> Turn Windows Features On or Off -> Roles -> Web Server (IIS) -> Add Role Services -> Check CGI
   • Create a new Web Site in IIS and make sure the physical path is the folder you created above
   • In the Handler Mappings for the new website, select "Add Script Map". Enter *.cgi for the request path, c:\Python26\python.exe -u "%s" for the Executable, and Python for the Name.

6. You will also need to create a file named "hgweb.config" with contents similar to below. The path within the file needs to be the location on your drive where you want to store the Mercurial repositories:

   [collections]
   c:\Mercurial\repos = c:\Mercurial\repos

7. Edit the hgweb.cgi file and change the line where it sets the path to your hgweb.config to something like the following (wherever the hgweb.config file is):

   config = "C:\Mercurial\hgweb.config"

8. Now, open a browser and navigate to http://localhost/mercurial/hgweb.cgi (or whatever is the appropriate URL path you set up in IIS) and you should see the Mercurial Repositories page.

Also, check out Jeremy Skinners blog post . It's a little outdated, but has some extra nice steps like setting up URL re-writing for cleaner URL's.

Solution 2

It seems since Mercurial 1.5.2 was released, these tutorials don't work exactly right. For one thing, hgwebdir.cgi has been removed, and is now replaced with hgweb.cgi.

The instructions that worked best for me is at eworldui.net:

http://www.eworldui.net/blog/post/2010/04/08/Setting-up-Mercurial-server-in-IIS7-using-a-ISAPI-module.aspx

Those instructions are meant for IIS 7 or greater. If you're setting this up on IIS 6, I wrote up similar instructions geared toward Win2k3 and IIS 6.0:

http://partialclass.blogspot.com/2010/05/setting-up-mercurial-server-on-win2k3.html

UPDATE: Shortly after getting this working I learned that BitBucket changed their pricing scheme to offer free, unlimited, private hosting: https://bitbucket.org/. I would've opted for that in a heartbeat when I was originally working on this project.

Solution 3

I found that the blog post at Vampire Basic was a good start, but it didn't go into nearly enough detail for what I was after.

I did a 4 part blog post on this that gets you up and running from scratch with IIS, including Active Directory integration, setting up of security privileges for push/pull, customization of the template, I'd reproduce it here, but it's quite long winded being that Mercurial was really designed to be hosted on Linux/Apache:

http://www.endswithsaurus.com/2010/05/setting-up-and-configuring-mercurial-in.html

Solution 4

There's a fairly good and comprehensive tutorial here: http://vampirebasic.blogspot.com/2009/06/running-mercurial-on-windows.html

Solution 5

Below are what I did after doing a fair amount of research for geting hgwebdir.cgi setup on IIS6 . It is based on the following sites:

• http://python.markrowsoft.com/iiswse.asp
• http://www.jeremyskinner.co.uk/mercurial-on-iis7/

You'll need to install the following on the server:

• Mercurial (I used version 1.5)
• Python 2.6. The version of Python depends on the version of Mercurial installed. Mercurial 1.5 uses Python 2.6. Install x86 even if you are running x64.

The steps for me were:

• Create a directory for the website. I used c:\inetpub\wwwroot\hg.
• In IIS, right click on the folder for hg, select properties, select the Home Directory tab.
• Click on the Create application button. Set the execute permissions to "scripts".
• Still in the Home Directory tab, click on the Configuration button. In the "Application Configuration" popup, click the Add button to add an application extension. The Executable is c:\Python26\python.exe -u "%s" "%s". The extension is .cgi. Set the "verbs" to "limit to: GET,HEAD,POST". Check both Script engine and Verify that file exists.
• In the Directory Security tab, click on the Edit button in the Authentication and access control section. Uncheck all authentication methods, and check the "Basic authenication" method. Set the Default domain if you like to your Active Directory domain.
• In IIS, click on the Web Service Extensions folder on the left panel. Click on "Add a new Web service extension" link. Extension name should be Python, the required file is c:\Python26\python.exe -u "%s" "%s". Make sure the new extension is "Allowed".

Now is a good time to test that Python is working. Create a file in your new Hg folder called test.cgi. Paste the following python code:

print 'Status: 200 OK'
print 'Content-type: text/html'
print

print '<html><head>'
print ''
print '<h1>It works!</h1>'
print ''
print ''

Open the browser to your site, for instance, http://localhost/hg/test.cgi

You should see "It works!" in the browser.

Next let's get the hgwebdir working.

• Delete test.cgi
• clone the hg repo to a new directory: https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/
• copy hgwebdir.cgi to your web directory: c:\inetpub\wwwroot\hg\ from the cloned hg repo
• Edit the file and change

application = hgwebdir('hgweb.config')
wsgicgi.launch(application)

to

application = hgwebdir('c:\inetpub\wwwroot\hg\hgweb.config')
wsgicgi.launch(application)

• Unzip the Library.zip file in the Mercurial directory, c:\Program Files\Mercurial\, to your web directory, c:\inetpub\wwwroot\hg\
• Copy the templates directory from c:\Program Files\Mercurial\templates\ to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\hg\templates\
• Create a file called hgweb.config in your web directory.

Now is a good time to test it out. Go to the following URL in the browser, http://localhost/hg/hgwebdir.cgi

• Edit hgweb.config, and paste the following:

[collections]
\\server\share$\Hg\ = \\server\share$\Hg\
[web]
allow_push = *
push_ssl = false

These are all my preferences, for instance we have our repos in subdirectories at \\server\share$\Hg. The web app will run under the permissions of the logged in user via the browser, so they'll need read/write permissions to the share.

The last step is to allow for long connections which can happen when you first clone a repo. Run the following command to increase the timeout to 50 minutes:

cd \inetpub\AdminScripts\
cscript adsutil.vbs GET /W3SVC/CGITimeout 
cscript adsutil.vbs SET /W3SVC/CGITimeout 3000

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Comments

[Brad Bruce]

I've used these directions to set Mercurial and IIS up under XP (Professional). The index shows up, but if I click any of the repository links I get a 404 error. Any suggestions?

[Brad Bruce]

Found IT!!!! When setting up the .cgi mapping the Executable entry should read c:\Python25\python.exe -u "%s" and MAKE SURE Check that file exists is UNCHECKED!!!!!!

[Ken]

I originally tried to get things configured with Jeremy Skinner's tutorial and ran into issues with hgwebdir.cgi being removed. Using the IIS7 tutorial, I was able to get things setup with any complications. Thanks!

[Ken]

These instructions are a bit outdated now. Check out Ken's answer for more updated instructions: stackoverflow.com/questions/818571/…

[user3162901]

Excellent -- thanks for pointing out these very useful references, Ken P.

[Goyuix]

Wow - I wish I could upvote this to the top! Very well done. Any reason you didn't just use the URL Rewrite module from iis.net/download/URLRewrite ???

[BenAlabaster]

@Goyuix - Thanks, there's 2 reasons I didn't use that - 1. I had no idea it existed and nobody pointed me in that direction. 2. The little amount of research I did turned up ISAPI Rewrite which sufficed for the purpose I was using it for, so that's what I ended up using. Thanks for pointing that out though, I'll check it out.

[BenAlabaster]

@Goyuix - The info you pointed me to suggests that IIS URL Rewrite is for IIS 7? Is this available for IIS 6? My blog post was targeted at IIS 6 as that's what I was/am currently using.

[BenAlabaster]

This blog post is a great start, but falls somewhat short. I wrote a fairly extensive set of blog posts about hosting Mercurial on IIS - see my answer below: stackoverflow.com/questions/818571/…

[Łukasz]

This is an awesome series of posts. You should definitely do a follow up for IIS 7

[BenAlabaster]

@BobTheBuilder - I'm planning on it, but I've gotta find time to upgrade my server to Win2K8, for the moment I'm on Win2K3 which tbh has sufficed for my needs and has been pretty solid, so I've had no requirement to upgrade.

[SwDevMan81]

+1 Great job, only need to change a few minor things for Mercurial 1.7

[jocull]

Can you include steps for bypassing the 30MB upload limit imposed by IIS? I've tried setting both maxAllowedContentLength and maxRequestLength but neither seem to be having an effect!