Setting username in Mercurial .hgrc file

Question

I have been browsing SO and Google for a solution to my basic problem, and so far I have had no luck.

I am brand new to Mercurial and have just installed it on my Mac. I am using it for personal version control and will not be communicating with a central server (yet).

When I try to commit files, I get abort: no username supplied (see "hg help config"). The common solution to this problem is putting the following in ~/.hgrc

[ui]
username = Firstname Lastname <[email protected]>

which I have done, but the error remains. It just won't read the file. Any suggestions?

Solution

For future reference: use

$ hg showconfig ui --debug

to see the settings from the [ui] section and to see the files Mercural reads for configuration settings. That should help you along if you ever have to debug such a case again.

Comments

[Ishbir]

Could be some typo on your part. Please verify that cat ~/.hgrc (copy-paste that to a shell) produces the necessary config data. Update your question with the (appropriately anonimized) output.

[Paul S]

@Adam Mercurial.ini is Windows only.

[Adam Houldsworth]

@PaulS Yeah I suspected as much :-(

[daniel kullmann]

What is the output of hg.exe showconfig | grep ui?

[César]

Does hg commit -u username -m "msg" works?

[kamek]

Sorry for the delay -- I currently have not internet access on the computer that I have been setting up Mercurial. Well the problem is "fixed", in that restarting my computer (for the first time in a month or so) seems to have fixed the problem (however, the reliability of this is unknown).

[Martin Geisler]

@danielkullmann: just a small note: instead of using grep (which is normally not there on Windows), then just do hg showconfig ui to get the settings from the [ui] section.