Remote Repository Creation for Mercurial Over HTTP

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, but it's no safer.

Grand Central Direct Dialer

I'm a huge fan of Grand Central's call screening features. It's irksome, however, that they make it hard to dial outward -- sending your GC number instead of your cell number as the caller id. To do so you need to first add the target number to your address book, and often I'm calling someone I don't intend to call again often.

I started scripting up a way around that when I saw someone named Stewart already had.

I wanted to be able to easily dial outbound from my cellphone, so I created a mobile friendly web form around his script. The script requires info you should never give out (username, password, etc.), so you should really download the script and run it on your own webserver.

It also generates a bookmarklet you can drag to your browser's toolbar that will automatically dial any selected/highlighted phone number from your GC Number.

Sasha Megan Bauer Brase

On July 29th, Kate gave birth to Sasha Megan Bauer Brase. Details and photos are on her site.