Mercurial remote repository names
I just discovered that Mercurial supports named shortcuts for repositories. This is great for when you want to be pushing and pulling from several repository URLs without typing their full locations.
I was aware you could set a default and default-push repository in .hg/hgrc, in fact whenever you clone a repository a default remote path is created for you.
You can actually put arbitrary names in there. For example, I have a repository “chatbots” that I cloned from Katie’s repository: http://katharos.id.au/hg/chatbots". I want to be able to push and pull changes from my repository as well as pull from her’s without typing the full path out at any time.
[paths]
default = ssh://hg@delx.au/chatbots
katie = http://katharos.id.au/hg/chatbots
The above snippet goes in the repositories .hg/hgrc, and I can now run commands like this:
$ hg pull katie
$ hg push
This pulls any new changes in from Katie’s repository and pushes them to the default, mine.
Ahh, now it makes sense why it takes an entire section to itself (‘[paths]’).
Thanks for this discovery, it will mean I wont have to rely on my bash history as much anymore.