Help: urls

URL Paths

Valid URLs are of the form:

local/filesystem/path[#revision]
file://local/filesystem/path[#revision]
http://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
https://[user[:pass]@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
ssh://[user@]host[:port]/[path][#revision]
path://pathname

Paths in the local filesystem can either point to Mercurial repositories or to bundle files (as created by 'hg bundle' or 'hg incoming --bundle'). See also 'hg help paths'.

An optional identifier after # indicates a particular branch, tag, or changeset to use from the remote repository. See also 'hg help revisions'.

Some features, such as pushing to http:// and https:// URLs are only possible if the feature is explicitly enabled on the remote Mercurial server.

Note that the security of HTTPS URLs depends on proper configuration of web.cacerts.

Some notes about using SSH with Mercurial:

  • SSH requires an accessible shell account on the destination machine and a copy of hg in the remote path or specified with remotecmd.
  • path is relative to the remote user's home directory by default. Use an extra slash at the start of a path to specify an absolute path:
    ssh://example.com//tmp/repository
    
  • Mercurial doesn't use its own compression via SSH; the right thing to do is to configure it in your ~/.ssh/config, e.g.:
    Host *.mylocalnetwork.example.com
      Compression no
    Host *
      Compression yes
    

    Alternatively specify "ssh -C" as your ssh command in your configuration file or with the --ssh command line option.

These URLs can all be stored in your configuration file with path aliases under the [paths] section like so:

[paths]
alias1 = URL1
alias2 = URL2
...

You can then use the alias for any command that uses a URL (for example 'hg pull alias1' will be treated as 'hg pull URL1').

Two path aliases are special because they are used as defaults when you do not provide the URL to a command:

default:
When you create a repository with hg clone, the clone command saves the location of the source repository as the new repository's 'default' path. This is then used when you omit path from push- and pull-like commands (including incoming and outgoing).
default-push:
The push command will look for a path named 'default-push', and prefer it over 'default' if both are defined.

These alias can also be use in the 'path://' scheme:

[paths]
alias1 = URL1
alias2 = path://alias1
...

check 'hg help config.paths' for details about the behavior of such "sub-path".