nth.io/luke/projects/mercurial-wsgi-nginx/

by Luke Hoersten on 2020-07-02
#Mercurial #SelfHosting #Nginx

I wanted to host my code without a lot of extra infrastructure, apps, and metadata to operate and maintain. I just wanted a simple way to share my repos. Contributors can easily send patches via email without a whole new login and user system. I saw hg.prosody.im and was inspired by it's simplicity.

Given the overwhelming popularity of Git and full-service solutions like GitLab, there are only a couple helpful, but slightly outdated, guides for Mercurial + Nginx. It was enough to get me up and running, though, and I wanted to document how I got things working.

Mercurial can run a fork of cgit via WSGI and hosted by Nginx. Check the repo for the most up-to-date version of these configs in an Ansible role. The setup is as follows for my code hosted at the subdomain src.nth.io:

Nginx -> UNIX domain socket -> WSGI -> Mercurial repos

Dependencies

This particular setup is running Ubuntu 20.04.

Nginx Config

Path: /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/src.nth.io.conf

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name src.nth.io;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl http2;
    listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on;
    server_name src.nth.io;

    ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/src.nth.io/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/src.nth.io/privkey.pem;
    include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf;
    ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem;

    ssl_ecdh_curve X25519:prime256v1:secp384r1:secp521r1;
    ssl_stapling on;
    ssl_stapling_verify on;

    location / {
        include     uwsgi_params;
        uwsgi_param REMOTE_PORT     $remote_port;
        uwsgi_param SERVER_PORT     $server_port;
        uwsgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
        uwsgi_param UWSGI_SCHEME    $scheme;
        uwsgi_param SCRIPT_NAME     /;
        uwsgi_param AUTH_USER       $remote_user;
        uwsgi_param REMOTE_USER     $remote_user;
        uwsgi_pass  unix:/run/uwsgi/app/hgweb/socket;
    }
}

UWSGI Config

Path: /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled/hgweb.ini

Note the socket key matches the uwsgi_pass parameter from the Nginx config above.

[uwsgi]
processes = 2
max-requests = 10240
max-requests-delta = 1024
max-worker-lifetime = 604800
socket = unix:/run/uwsgi/app/hgweb/socket
chdir = /var/www/src.nth.io
wsgi-file = hgweb.wsgi
uid = www-data
gid = www-data
plugins = python3

The max request lines allow the uwsgi server to restart the workers and mitigate memory leaks in the HG Web script without incurring downtime.

HgWeb Script

Path: /var/www/src.nth.io/hgweb.wsgi

config = "/var/www/src.nth.io/hgweb.config"
from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()
from mercurial.hgweb import hgweb
application = hgweb(config.encode())

HgWeb Config

Path: /var/www/src.nth.io/hgweb.config

Note the actual Mercurial repo path at /var/hg/repos.

[paths]
/ = /var/hg/repos

[web]
deny_push = *
allow_archive = gz bz2 zip
encoding = UTF-8
style = gitweb

[extensions]
hgext.highlight =

Running

With this all set up, sudo systemctl start uwsgi and sudo systemctl start nginx. If something doesn't work, check the logs. Ensure the UWSGI user and group allows for read access to the repo directory.

Both the Nginx and uWSGI Ubuntu packages are set to actually have the configs at {sites|apps}-available and then symlinked to the respective {sites|apps}-enabled directories, as documented on their websites.

Theming

Check out the Mercurial docs for instructions on theming the website.