Remote Repository Creation for Mercurial Over HTTP
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I park in the #mercurial IRC channel a lot to answer the easy questions, and on that comes up often is, "How can I create a remote repository over HTTP?". The answer is: "You can't.".

Mercurial allows you to create a repository remotely using ssh with a command line like this::

	hg clone localrepo ssh://host//abs/path

but there's no way to do that over HTTP using either hg serve or hgweb behind Apache.

I kept telling people it would be a very easy CGI to write, so a few months
back I put my time where my mouth was and did it.::

	#!/bin/sh

	echo -n -e "Content-Type: text/plain\n\n"

	mkdir -p /my/repos/$PATH_INFO
	cd /my/repos/$PATH_INFO
	hg init

That gets saved in unsafecreate.cgi and pointed to by Apache like this::

	ScriptAlias /unsafecreate /path/to/unsafecreate.cgi

and you can remotely invoke it like this::

	http://your-poorly-admined-host.com/unsafecreate/path/to/new/repo

That's littered with warning about its lack of safety and bad administrative practices because you're pretty much begging for someone to do this::

	http://your-poorly-admined-host.com/unsafecreate/something%3Brm%20-rf%20

Which is not going to be pretty, but on a LAN maybe it's a risk you can live with. Me? I just use ssh.

At the time I first suggested this someone chimed in with `a cleaned up version in the original pastie <http://paste.lisp.org/display/80442#2>`_, but it's no safer.

.. date: 1253163600
.. tags: mercurial,ideas-built,software