One of the most prominent (and rightly so) features of Mercurial is its built-in web-interface that not only lets you pull from your repositories via plain old HTTP but also offers a simple history and graph browser (among other things).
But if you want to use hgweb(dir) within a company you probably also want to have it styled in your CI. For the most part creating your own style is rather simple. But while trying it out for a simple CI-style I ran into a small issue.
Creating a style that you want to use for your repository is rather simple:
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Create your map-file and all the relevant templates (or just copy them over from for example the “paper” style) in some arbitrary location that can be accessed by your hgwebdir user. The wiki has some information about what comes into each file.
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Use the web.templates and web.staticurl settings within your hgweb.config to tell Mercurial where to find your style and the URL your static content is reachable at:
[web] templates = /path/to/your/templates-folder/new-style staticurl = http://media.server.com/hg-static
This works for all the pages that are associated directly with a single repository. But once you get to the repository-listing, the whole “in some arbitrary directory” part no longer seems to work. hgwebdir will always fall back to “paper” (the default style).
From what I can tell, the reason for this is that hgwebdir for the index relies exclusively on the style-name, which is something you can’t really influence with the web.templates setting. And styles resolve exclusively to folder in your mercurial/templates folder within your Mercurial installation.
So far I’ve only found 2 workarounds for this and neither is really all that appealing:
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Symlink or copy your new template folder into mercurial/templates
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Monkey-patch the mercurial.templater module from within the WSGI script to also look within your own template-repository.
from mercurial import templater templater.path[0:0] = ['/path/to/your/templates-folder/']
In either case you no longer have to set web.templates but can just select your style using web.style. IMO the second solution is a bit more flexible since you don’t have to re-link your style if you update Mercurial and your update-tool decides to first remove the mercurial package altogether.
Now I’m just curious if there is a cleaner solution out there :-) There has to be a cleaner way to manipulate the search path and that I have missed.
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂