HOWTO setup the Mercurial with Nginx in CentOS 4
Development September 5th, 2009
As my VPS provider Advantagecom Networks gracefully acknowledged the life-time promotion I enrolled in one year ago, I decided to settle in this ISP. Which also means that I am stuck to the current configuration: python-2.3.4 in CentOS 4.
Unlike Gentoo, there is no shortcut to upgrade CentOS 4 to CentOS 5 seamlessly. Some adventurous pilots tried and failed miserably, also the customer service disregarded this approach. I wish I could reinstall the OS in SSH session. So we fallback the plan B to update the essential components only.
Update the python
tar xvfj Python-2.6.2.tar.bz2
cd Python-2.6.2
./configure –prefix=/opt
make && sudo make install
Update the setuptools for python-2.6
Temporarily override the PATH to use python-2.6:
PATH=/opt/python/bin:$PATH sudo sh build/setuptools-0.6c9-py2.6.egg
By default, easy_install will be installed into /opt/python/bin
Install Mercurial and flup
sudo /opt/python/bin/easy_install flup
Setup the Mercurial repository
sudo /usr/sbin/groupadd hg
sudo /usr/sbin/useradd -g hg -s /bin/false hg
sudo mkdir /var/hg
sudo chown hg:hg /var/hg
sudo chmod g+w /var/hg
# Add myself to hg group
sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -G hg bookstack
hg init /var/hg/bloggo
Serve Mercurial via flup
Copy the fastcgi script hgwebdir.fcgi from /usr/share/doc/mercurial-1.3.1/contrib/, and configure the hgweb.config:
/ = /var/hg/**
[web]
style = monoblue
allow_push = *
push_ssl = false
Spawn the fastcgi script using this script.
Note: the PATH environment variable needs to be overrided by /opt/python/bin to use python-2.6.
Install Nginx
Just follow this HOWTO.
Now we need to setup the Nginx to expose the Mercurial repository in nginx.conf:
server {
listen 80;
server_name dev.kunxi.org;
root /var/web/$host;
access_log logs/$host.access.log main;
error_log logs/$host.error.log;
location /hg/ {
fastcgi_split_path_info ^(/hg)(/.*)$;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
include fastcgi_params;
limit_except GET HEAD {
deny all;
}
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9003;
}
}
The directive limit_except in Nginx seem not to work as expected. If we add auth_basic in limit_except block, Nginx will ask for the credential first, then tries to server the static content in /hg/project_name instead of passing the request to the underlying fastcgi. I encountered the similar problem in MoinMoin setup, so I just deny all the POST operations, and use SSH instead. This is not the perfect solution for sure, but it works fine for personal source depot.
thx…great help!
what is flup for?
flup is a WSGI server with FastCGI interface, so it can talk to nginx using fcgi protocol.