Using Mercurial on your home directory

This is a follow up to my previous post, Setting Up Version Control On Your Home Directory. This post will cover using Mercurial instead of Git to store the files in your home directory.

To start this off you need to install Mercurial

sudo [yum or apt-get] install mercurial

The next step is initializing the repository in your home directory and protect others from being able to read files.

$ cd ~
$ hg init
$ chmod 700 .hg/

In my previous post a commenter pointed out something I was not aware of. When using git if you were to run ‘git clean’ all files not under version control would get deleted. You should be doing regular backups anyway, but that is certainly something we do not want to be able to do on accident. The hg equivalent is ‘hg purge’, but purge is a bundled extension that must be enabled, and because it might be enabled we want to explicitly disable that plugin from being able to work in our repository. To do so you put the following line in ~/.hg/hgrc, because that file will take precedence over conf files in etc and your ~/.hgrc file.

[extensions]
hgext.purge = !

You can store anything you would like to in this repository, but there is most likely going to be some files, and very large files at that, that you do not want to store. To fix that we are going to start off by ignoring everything in your home directory and selectively removing files from the list that we want to store. The following commands are going to list all non-hidden files, but listing directories first, the second command lists everything except for ‘.’ and ‘..’ directory references and greps for all hidden files and lists them directories first. One thing to note is that the –group-directories-first option is not available on CentOS and the only distro I can confirm it exists in is Ubuntu.

$ ls -1 --group-directories-first > .hgignore
$ ls -1 --group-directories-first -A | grep '^\.' >> .hgignore
$ cat .hgignore
Applications
bin
Desktop
...
.cache
.checkbox
.compiz
...
.bash_aliases
.bash_history
.bash_logout
...
.xsession-errors

Go through the list and either comment out (prepend with #) or remove from .hgignore any file/directory names that you DO want to store in version control, any file listed in .hgignore will be ignored by mercurial, unless you ‘hg add’ the file or directory.

If you want to see what files will be picked up by an ‘hg add’ you can run ‘hg status’

$ hg status
? .bash_history
? .bash_logout
? .bash_profile
? .bashrc
? .hgignore
? .hgrc
? .mysql_history
? .screenrc
? bin/mysqltuner.pl

If that is satisfactory you can now run ‘hg add’ to add the files listed here.

$ hg add
adding .bash_history
adding .bash_logout
adding .bash_profile
adding .bashrc
adding .hgignore
adding .hgrc
adding .mysql_history
adding .screenrc
adding bin/mysqltuner.pl

And you can verify it by again running ‘hg status’

$ hg status
A .bash_history
A .bash_logout
A .bash_profile
A .bashrc
A .hgignore
A .hgrc
A .mysql_history
A .screenrc
A bin/mysqltuner.pl

So go ahead now and run ‘hg commit’ and we can deal with individual files under ignored directories afterwards. Running ‘hg commit’ should be default use vi as your editor so after writing your description his Esc, then type :wq and it will commit.

Initial commit of home directory files.

Contains mostly bash dot files, but also a script in my bin directory

HG: Enter commit message.  Lines beginning with 'HG:' are removed.
HG: Leave message empty to abort commit.
HG: --
HG: user: Peter Manis <manis@pyverted.com>
HG: branch 'default'
HG: added .bash_history
HG: added .bash_logout
HG: added .bash_profile
HG: added .bashrc
HG: added .hgignore
HG: added .hgrc
HG: added .mysql_history
HG: added .screenrc
HG: added bin/mysqltuner.pl

So there were a couple directories I had in my .hgignore file that I would like to store certain files in version control. The first is .ssh and the second is .irssi. So to do this we run ‘hg add’ and then ‘hg commit’

$ hg add .ssh/config
$ hg add .irssi/config
$ hg status
A .irssi/config
A .ssh/config
$ hg commit
Adding files that are under ignored directories

HG: Enter commit message.  Lines beginning with 'HG:' are removed.
HG: Leave message empty to abort commit.
HG: --
HG: user: Peter Manis <manis@pyverted.com>
HG: branch 'default'
HG: added .irssi/config
HG: added .ssh/config

Let us now take a look at the local commits that we have.

$ hg log
changeset:   1:5ca5d6d283fe
tag:         tip
user:        Peter Manis <manis@pyverted.com>
date:        Thu Aug 13 19:48:16 2009 -0400
summary:     Adding files that are under ignored directories

changeset:   0:d0e3d9042208
user:        Peter Manis <manis@pyverted.com>
date:        Thu Aug 13 19:43:06 2009 -0400
summary:     Initial commit of home directory files.

We now need to prepare to push these local commits to our bitbucket private repository. To do this we need to setup ssh keys

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/mercurialguide/.ssh/id_rsa):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in /home/mercurialguide/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/mercurialguide/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
c5:fc:5b:3e:06:2c:3f:f9:17:51:bf:78:f8:60:ac:cb mercurialguide@hostname

Now sign up for a bitbucket account, create your first private repository, I called mine homedir. After you do that you need to go into your “Account” page and add your ssh public key to the list of ssh keys.

$ cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAwRewbcXoot9nUUZzonryDYKBhxapI69JRW5TNsxfJQEAw4l7VoA681sgHVA2B8T876Tn9uZrzMBgcEz4GMGVsrU31wVNa9p/HtBJCyp1zWKoitoR1wu2FdNRSgsjFOdlMJ6BIxchmG58/hwA88FZXdYgcKMe2WWQP7pDInhHIJhLKPoctXURr6kSM7TWLh4eO81amSE2GB77mCRIoqxI6Y0uQGqO6JDhFUQAPuErCJcfXSkO+Lv9XIyCwhclki2oZUMwvDyYYrHVHWCNZ/azY1C4Ea722CFSWQjAUI9ljA8yaYmLaI4tbgWu9bNQdNy7v9x9EMtq8Q828BF9LGb+tw== mercurialguide@hostname

You will also need to edit your .ssh/config file for bitbucket.

Host bitbucket.org
  User hg
  Compression yes

Now we can push changes to bitbucket

$ hg push ssh://bitbucket.org/manis/homedir/
pushing to ssh://bitbucket.org/manis/homedir/
searching for changes
remote: adding changesets
remote: adding manifests
remote: adding file changes
remote: added 2 changesets with 12 changes to 12 files
remote: bb/acl: manis is allowed. accepted payload.
remote: quota: 103.6 MB in use, 500.0 MB available (20.72% used)

And you’re done! You just setup a remote repository with your home directory files. Now that you have that setup remember that until you ‘hg push’ your changes they are only local.

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