Installing Mercurial on a Shared Web Server without Root Access (HostEurope)
SVN did a great job for me for at least four years now. Lately, I stumbled upon Mercurial and decided to have a closer look. It turned out that Mercurial (also called "hg") comes with some great advantages, namely:
- Not a "Version Control System" (VCS), but a "Distributed Version Control System" (DVCS) enabling you to check in changes locally (offline, without an internet connection). The advantages of this one are also discussed in detail in PEP 374 (Python Foundation).
- Available in pure Python, therefore installable on a standard shared web server without root access (not a virtual server, just a "web host"). Thereby cutting my costs of maintaining a root server on my own or being charged by a specialized host for an SVN/VPS plan.
This post is a small guide on how to accomplish the mission of installing Mercurial (the pure Python version) on a shared web host. In this exemplary case a "WebPack Pro" that we rent from our ISP of choice, HostEurope, is going to be used. However, what is described herein should basically work for any web hosting plan that fulfills the following requirements. This article is therefore most interesting for people who already own a shared web hosting plan and wish to use that plan for hg hosting also.
Installing Mercurial on a Shared Web Server without Root Access (HostEurope)